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[From the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters ] 



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FIRST FRENCH FOOT-PRINTS BEYOND THE LAKES; 

Oh, WHAT BROUGHT THE FRENCH SO EARLY 

INTO THE NORTHWEST? 

/ 

By JAMES D. BUTLEK, LL. D. 

l\ 

Copper mines iu the north, and burial-barrows everywhere, be- 
speak prehistoric races in Wisconsin. But 'vii> modern Wisconsin 
there was little agricultural settlement before 1836, which we may 
accordingly reckon its American birth year. 

Between these two developments, however, there was a third, a 
sort of midway station between the mound -builder or the Indian 
and the Anglo-Saxon — namely, the French period. This portion 
of our annals seems worthy of more attention than it has yet 
received. 

The French were early on Lake Huron, and even in Wiscon- 
sin. They were there before the cavaliers in Virginia, the Dutch 
at Albany, and the Puritans of Boston had pushed inland much 
more than a day's journey. The Mississippi was mapped before 
the Ohio. Champlain sailed on Lake Huron in 1615, only seven 
years after the settlement of Quebec. A monk had arrived there 
a month or two before Champlain. 

On early maps the contrast between French knowledge and 
English ignorance is at once plain to the eye. On the map drawn 
by Champlain, in 1632, we see the Lakes which we call Ontario, 
Huron, Superior and Michigan, while no one of them, nor indeed 
any river St Lawrence, is discoverable on Peter Heylin's atlas, 
the one best known in London twenty years afterward. On the 
blank, where those inland seas should have figured, we read the 
words America Mexicana, as if Mexico had extended to Hudson's 
Bay. 

But while the English on tb Atlantic coast were ignorant of 
western geography, and before the French in Canada numbered 
ten thousand, Joliet and Marquette, in 1673, traversed Wisconsin 
from lake to river. They were long supposed to be among the 
earliest explorers of Wisconsin. In 1853, however, the Catholic 

iB 






historian, J. G. Shea, pointed out in a volume of Jesuit Eelaiiom 
the following words, written from Quebec to France, in 1640, by 
Father Le Jeune : " M. Nicollet, who has penetrated into the 
most distant regions, has assured me that if he had pushed on 
three days longer down a great river which issues from the second 
lake of the Hurons (evidently meaning Lake Michigan), he would 
have found the sea." 

The word Mississippi, meaning "great water," was ambiguous, 
and, though really denoting a river, might well be mistaken for a 
sea, especially by an adventurer who knew the sea to be in that 
direction, and who believed it by no means remote. 

On the strength of this Jesuit testimony, Parkman remarks : 
" As early as 1639, Nicollet ascended the Green Bay of Lake 
Michigan and crossed to the waters of the Mississippi." This was 
within nine years after the founding of Boston, which claims to be 
of all northern cities the most ancient. 

But in the lowest deep a lower deep still opens. According to 
the latest researches of Benjamin Suite, Nicollet was in Wiscon- 
sin four or five years earlier than 1639. He started west from 
Canada in 1634, and returned the year following. The best 
Canadian investigators assure us that he never traveled west 
again, but, marrying and becoming interpreter at Three Eivers, 
below Montreal, he remained there or thereabouts thenceforward 
till his death. All agree that Nicollet visited Wisconsin. If it 
is proved that he was not here in 1639 or afterward, he must have 
been here before. There is some reason for holding that Nicollet 
had penetrated into Wisconsin at a date still earlier than 1634. 

Chicago is not known to have been visited by any European 
before 1673. In the autumn of that year Marquette, returning 
from his voyage down the Mississippi, was conducted from the 
Illinois river by Indians to that spot as affording the shortest port- 
age to Lake Michigan. The next year that missionary, on a coast- 
ing tour along the lake, after a voyage of forty-one days from 
Green Bay, reached Chicago, — which was then uninhabited. As 
sickness disabled him from going further, bis Indian oarsman 
built him a hut, and two French traders who already had a post a 
few leagues inland, ministered to him till the next spring, when 



he so far recovered as to proceed to St Joseph. Another Jesuit 
was also met at Chicago by four score warriors of the Illinois 
tribe in 1676. 

Three years afterward, in 1679, La Salle found no inhabitants 
there. On his map made the next year he described it as a port- 
age of only a thousand paces, yet thought it in no way suited 
for communication between the lake and Illinois river, as the latter 
at low water was for forty leagues not navigable. Within two 
year."? after that, however, in 1681, he preferred this route for his 
own passage. On the sixteenth of December starting from Chi- 
cago iRith canoes on sleds, he arrived at the mouth of the Mis- 
sissippi in one hundred and seven days, — that is <)n the sixth of 
the following April. 

The Chicago portage was traversed by Tonty, La Salle's most 
trusted and trust- worthy lieutenant, June, 1683, and by Durantye in 
1685. La Salle's brother detained there in 1688 by a storm, 
made maple sugar, and in one hundred and ten days after leaving 
its harbor, had made his way to Montreal. 

After eleven years more, St. Cosme found a house of the 
Jesuits there established, at which, as at a sort of post office, 
Father Gravier obtained in 1700, letters from Paris. From that 
point La Salle had written a letter to La Barre, Governor of 
Canada, in 1683, and in the map by Franquelin, royal hydro- 
grapher at Quebec, dated 1684, eighty houses, — meaning wig- 
wams, are set down on the site of Chicago. It was then viewed 
as a northern out post of La Salle's central castle — the Rock of 
St. Louis, — that marvellous natural fortress which the French 
explorer found ready to his hand, — " his wish exactly to his 
heart's desire," now called Starved Rock^ near the confluence of the 
Big Vermilion with the Illinois river, a few miles west of Ottawa. 

All the way down from this era of La Salle the French as 
rovers, traders, settlers, soldiers and missionaries in our North- 
west, are traceable generation after generation. The chain is as 
unbroken as that of apostolical succession has ever been fancied. 

How shall we account for the phenomenon I have now sketched^ 
that the French penetrated so far inland so early and so persist- 
ently ? My answer to this question is implied in the words Fun, 
Faith, Fur, False Fancies, Finesse and Feudalism. 



Nicollet, it is admitted, was west of Lake Michigan before La 
Salle was born. What brought him thas early into the heart of 
the cootineDt ? 

My answer is that he came for sport ; yes, just for the fun of 
the thing — or the romance and exhilaration of adventure. 

Where is the community in which it is not proverbial to this 
day that worlds of fun lie in camping? What amount of civili- 
zation can kill off love for a feast of tabernacles, or relish for 
camp-meetings ? What boy reads Robinson Crusoe without a 
passion to run away ? Hunting, fishing, boating, discovering new 
.'lakes and streams, new varieties of woodland and opening, attack- 
ing or eluding antagonists — whether men or beasts — fire, frost, 
:flood, famine; "foemen worthy of their steely" for what man 
that is young, strong and brave, must not these excitements have 
charms? When will the English give up their Alpine club ? In 
France no man was more of a sportsman than the King, Louis 
XIV, and in his era especially, French country gentlemen spent 
most of their time hunting and fishing. Accordingly for the French 
those pursuits had dignified associations. The first French party 
that ever wintered on the shore of Lake Brie thus wrote home, 
more than two centuries ago : " We were in a terrestrial paradisa 
Fish and beaver abounded. We saw more than a hundred roe- 
bucks in a single band, and half as many fawns. Bear's meat 
was more savory than any pork in France. We dried or buc- 
caned the meat of the nine largest. The grapes were as large and 
sweet as any at home. We even made wine. No lack of prunes, 
.chestnuts and lotus fruit all the autumn. None of us were home- 
:sick for Montreal." Far west was the happy hunting ground of 
Indian fable. There too the French found it in fact. 

The late Judge Baird of Grreen Bay used to describe as the hap- 
piest three weeks of his life, the time when, taking his family and 
friends, with a crew of Indian oarsmen, he voyaged in a bark 
canoe from our great lake to our great river, along the track of 
Joliet and Marquette. Every day the ladies gathered flowers as 
fair as Proserpine plucked in the field of Enna, while the men 
were never without success as fishers and hunters. They camped, 
usually early in the afternoon, wherever inclination was attracted 
by natural beauty or romantic appearance. After feasting on 



venison, fish and wild-fowl, they slept beside plashing waters till 
roused by morning birds. At every turn in the rivers, new scen- 
ery opened upon them. Overhanging groves, oak openings, 
prairies, rapids, Baraboo bluffs, outcrops of rock, ravines, mouths 
of branches, each was a pleasant surprise. That merry month of 
May, 1830, recalled to the voyager, in the long lapse from youth 
to age, no other like itself. How many would give half their 
lives for such a wild-wood memory ! 

In the light of such an experience, it is easy to see how Nicol- 
let was drawn on and on into the unknown west. No wonder 
that, only ten years after Quebec was occupied, we find him, in 
1618, wintering half-way from that new-born post to Lake Huron, 
in the Isle of Allumette. He had no longing for the security of 
dwellers beneath the guns of Quebec. Amid his perils he de- 
spised them, as Caudle-lectured husbands despise those couples 
who vegetate together for years without a cross word, but in such 
a stupid style that they never know they are born. 

Nicollet was a representative of a large element among French 
Canadians. In 1609, at one of Champlain's first interviews with 
Indians from the remote interior, a young man of his company 
had boldly volunteered to join them on their homeward journey, 
and to winter among them. He remembered Pierre Grambie, a 
page of Laudonniere in Florida, who being allowed to go freely 
among the Indians, had become prime favorite with the chief of 
the island of Edelano, married his daughter, and in his absence 
reigned in his stead. Champlain's retainer was among the first of 
a class — up to everything, down to everything — who " followed 
the Indians in their roamings, grew familiar with their language, 
allied themselves with their women, became oracles in the camp 
and leaders on the war-path." 

Their fun was as fast and furious as Tam O'Shanter's : 

" Kings may be great, but they were glorious, 
O'er all the ills of life victorious." 

For them civilization was no longer either cold or hot — but sa 
lukewarm that they spewed it out of their mouths. Something 
of their feeling burned in their best historian, Francis Parkman,. 



-who exchanged Boston for the Black Hills before one miner had 
pushed into their fastnesses. His strongest youthful passion was 
to share in unaltered Indian life, and his loudest cry was : "Sav- 
agery, with all thy lacks I love thee still !" 

Preference for Indian life has grown up even in Faw^ee captives, 
-and, what is most surprising, in females. 

A well-known instance was the daughter of Williams — the 
Massachusetts minister — who refused to be redeemed from cap- 
tivity in a Canadian tribe. Some will suggest that having been 
brought up in a parsonage of 'grim and vinegar aspect, she 
thought nothing could be more repulsive than a Puritan strait- 
jacket. But many similar instances occurred during Bouquet's 
expedition west of the Ohio, which was undertaken in order to 
rescue whites from Indian bondage. Several women, and those 
•not of ministerial families at all, when compelled to return to 
white settlements, soon made their escape to the woods, prefer- 
ring wigwams to their native homes. No thrice-driven bed of 
down was so soft to them as a couch which, as their phrase was, 
had never been made up since the creation. Many captive meriy 
when given up to Bouquet, and bound fast to prevent their es- 
cape, sat sullen and scowling that they were forced back into 
society. 

In civilized society there was no sweet savor of romance for 

"A wild and wanton herd, 
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts." 

No wonder, then, adventurers into the great west, who would 
rather be scalped at Mackinaw than live in Montreal, became a 
permanent class. No wonder when La Salle, first of white men, 
had burst into the heart of Illinois, six of his soldiers deserted, 
and that as many more of his little band had ran away in the far 
north. One of these last absconders was encountered by Henne- 
pin in the wilds of Minnesota. Another in that region was a run- 
away from Hennepin himself. Nothing less than throwing them- 
selves overboard from all social restraints could give scope for 
that superabundant vitality which philosophers hold is pre- 
eminently a French characteristic. ' 



The roving class was all the larger, because settled colonists 
were vassals, both ia soul and body. In Canada, individuals 
existed for the government, not the government for individuals. 

Cooped up in the dull exile of petty forts, their prayer was 
that of the country mouse when entrapped in a city mansion — 

" O give me but a hollow tree, 
A crust of bread aad liberty." 

La Hontan — a young ofl&cer fresh from France — thus wrote 
home from Montreal : " A part of the winter I was hunting with 
the Algonquins, the rest of it I spent here very disagreeably. 
One can neither go on a pleasure party, nor play cards, nor visit 
the ladies, without the cure preaching about it; and masqueraders 
he excommunicates." 

Other writers add that no dances were allowed in which both 
sexes took part. 

Allowing dances to one sex only was about as satisfactory to 
gay and festive youth as a father confessor's permitting a fair 
penitent to rouge onl}'' one side of her face ; or letting out an 
American lady to walk the Parisian boulevards only on condi- 
tion that she never goes alone, never wears colors, and never looks 
into a shop window. Anti-dancing laws — it is needless to add, — 
were doubly vexatious to a Frenchman, since his feet when he's 
sleeping seem dreaming a dance. 

Fathers who neglected to marry sons till they were twenty, or 
daughters till they were sixteen, were fined. Bachelors were 
barred out from the Indian trade, and even branded with marks 
of infamy. 

In Quebec chronicles for 1671 we read that Paul Dupuy, having 
said that when the English cut off the head of Charles I. they did 
a good thing, the council declared him guilty of words tending to 
sedition, and condemned him to be led in his shirt, with a rope 
about his neck and a torch in his hand, from prison to the castle, 
there to ask pardon of the king ; to be branded on the cheek, set 
in stocks, laid in irons, etc. 

At the same period Louis Gaboury. charged with eating meat 
in Lent, was sentenced to be tied tnree hours to a stake, and then 



8 

on his knees to ask pardon at the door of the chapel. Swearers, 
for the sixth offense, had the upper lip cat with a hot iron, and if 
thej still uttered oaths, had the tongue cut out altogether Two 
men were shot at Quebec for selling brandy to Indians. 

Not a few French immigrants had been tramps in the old world, 
and transportation to the new world gave them no new nature. 
The Bohemian element was in them as an instinct, and was as 
sure to cotne out by natural selection as ducklings hatched by a 
hen are to take to water. The Saint Lawrence flowed in one di- 
rection ; the sinful loafers steered in quite another. 

Other Canadians had been convicts and so would naturally re- 
gard all walls as stifling imprisonment. They were not a pious 
race, but one prayer they never forgot, namely: ''From red-tape 
and ritualism, good Lord, deliver us !" 

An order of Indian Knights sprung up — young men who 
thought nothing so fine as to go tricked out like Indians, and 
nothing so attractive as Indian life ; doing nothing, caring for 
nothing, following every inclination, and getting out of the way 
of all correction. This club may have been a natural reaction 
from a society of matrons and maidens established to promote 
gossip pure and simple. Meetings were held every Thursday at 
which each member was bound by a gospel oath to confess — not 
his own sins, but other people's — that is. all she knew, alike good 
and bad, regarding her acquaintance. 

There i.-^ a physical reason why those who have learned to live 
in the open air cannot live in houses. Sleeping under roofs they 
exchange oxygen for miasma. 

The Circassian mountain chief, S hamyl, when a Russian pris- 
oner, was luxuriously housed, but at the end of a week told his 
keepers he must commit suicide unless they would allow him to 
lodge above the roof instead of under it. So, too, our Texan hero, 
Sam Houston, when, after open air campaigns, he entered the 
hall of congress, compared himself to a mouse under an air 
pump. 

"Yes, there is sweetness in the prairie air, 
And life that bloated ease can never hope to share." 



During several years of frontier life, I have constantly fallen in 
witli frontier men, who hover in the wilderness beyond the ut- 
most verge of settlement. Villages, or at least ranchmen, follow 
them but only, as Paddy prays the blessing of the Lord may fol- 
low his enemies all the days of their lives — that is, so as never to 
overtake them at all. Change of base and new departures are as 
familiar to them as to any politician. The only grain they ever 
sow is wild oats. 

The French found more fun in woodcraft than the English 
could. The one could thrive where the other would starve. It 
is an old saying that a French cook will make more out of the 
shadow of a chicken than an English one can of its substance. 
When a French army, near Salamanca, was cut off from supplies 
for a week by Wellington, he thought it a miracle that they did 
not surrender. The truth was that they had subsisted all the 
while on acorns. For more than a week Nicollet's only food was 
bark, seasoned with bits of the moss which the Canadians named 
rochtrlpe. But he was not starved otit. The Roman empire 
spread widely east and west, but never very far north. The fact 
is strange. To account for it, some say that Roman noses were 
too long, and so were nipppd off by Jack Frost. The French are 
a snub-nosed race and so could better brave blizzards. 

There is a strange elation when we discover with how many so- 
called necessaries we (an dispense, and while having nothing, yet 
possess all things which we absolutely need. Detecting new 
capabilities, whether of daring doing or enduring, we seem to 
become new beings and of a higher order. We discover new 
Americas within ourselves. 

According to the Greek sage, he is nearest the Gods who has 
fewest wants. In proportion, then, as we become self-sufficing, 
we approximate to the Gods. Not without exultation did the 
adventurer learn to make all things of bark — not only baskets, 
dishes, boats and beds, but houses and food. Every tree^ when 
he perceived its bark to be rougher and thicker on the north side, — 
became for him a compass-plant. In his whole manner of life 
" the forester gained," says Parkman, " a self-sustaining energy, 
as well as powers of action and perception before unthought of, — 



10 



a subtlety of sense more akin to the instinct of brutes than to hu- 
man reason. He could approach like a fox, attack like a lion, 
vanish like a bird." 

The Homeric and earliest ideal of an adventurer, single-handed, 
into unknown regions, was Ulysses. It is true he goes grumbling 
all through the Odyssey, — but for all that he is happier to the 
very core than he could be with Circe or Calypso in any castle of 
Indolence. He thrives under evil, and at every new stage of his 
wanderings has new greatness thrust upon him. More than this : 
According to Dante, who met him in the Inferno, he soon tired 
of the Ithacan home he had sought so earnestly, and quitted it 
for enterprises more distant and perilous than ever. 

Many of the early French pushed westward in pilgrimages 
longer and more varied than that of the most wide-wandering 
Greek. Their motto was : 

" No pent-up citadel contracts our powers. 
But the whole boundless continent is ours." 

They pushed into the heart of the continent faster and farther, 
thanks to matchless highways, — I mean rivers and lakes, — styled 
by their wisest contemporary, Pascal, " roads which march and 
carry us whithersoever we wish to go." Thanks also to bark ca- 
noes, they flew as on the wings of eagles into the recesses of the 
west. When wishing to traverse Indian routes they had sense 
enough to avail themselves of Indian hoats^ doing in Rome as Ro- 
mans do. For nine dollars worth of goods the voyageurs bought 
a bark twenty feet by two that would last six years. It would 
carry four men and more than their weight in baggage, yet was 
not too heavy for one man to carry across the portage between 
river and river, or round rapids which no boat could climb. Hen- 
nepin's bark weighed only fifty pounds. At night or in rains it 
was a better shelter than a tent. Thus the boatman was as inde- 
pendent as a soldier would be who could carry on his shoulders 
not only his horse and baggage, but also his barracks. Previous 
to the year 1673, no boat of wood had ever ascended above Mon- 
treal. The bark canoe of Judge Baird, of which I have spoken, 
was on a larger scale — about thirty feet long and five broad. It 
<5arried thirteen people and all their needments with ease. 



11 

Year after year La Salle risked life and lost fortune laboring 
to build a forty ton vessel for descending the Mississippi. After 
heart-breaking failures he trusted himself to a native canoe, and 
thanks to this new departure, easily gained the goal of his ambi- 
tion. Had he found the great river hedged up by Niagaras — as 
was reported by natives — his progress would not have been 
stopped. He could have carried his boat till his boat could carry 
him. 

A man who riding for the first time in a cab and asked where 
he was going answered, " To Glory ! " spoke out the exultation 
which thrilled every French adventurer with his face set toward 
the western unknown, his hands skilled in paddling a bark canoe 
and himself encumbered with no more baggage than the ship- 
wrecked rascal who said he had lost everything except his 
character. 

Throughout the orient the name of doctor is a sesame open. 
When Moslems overhear a traveler addressed as doctor they unbar 
for him even their harems, no matter how often he tells them that 
it is only in law or divinity or farriery, that he is a doctor. 

Among savages everywhere every civilized man passes in spite 
of himself for a physician. Relying on this reputation the early 
French ventured into the infinite west. Nor was their quackery 
less successful than that of an English monarch touching for the 
king's evil when 

" Strangely visited people 
All swollen and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, 
The mere despair of surgery, he cures." 

"When Hennepin was a captive among the Sioux, whose blood 
had belore been drawn only by the sucking mouths of medicine 
men, he bled their asthmatics, he treated other patients with a 
confection of hyacinth (a sort of squills) and desperate cases with 
orvietum, a theriac compounded of three score and four drugs. 
The more ingiedieni:^ the more certain, as men thought, the cure, 
as the more bullets in a volley the more surely some of them will 
hit. A decade earlier, Perrot having dosed a surfeited glutton 
with the same theriac, had succeeded as well as the druggist, who, 
when vox populi was prescribed, gave nux vomica. The next 



12 



night Perrot was waked bj chiefs who came for more theriac. 
His supply was so small that he only allowed them to hold their 
noses over the vial. The odor, however, proved a panacea. They 
beat their breasts and declared that it had made them immortal. 
For this sanitary smell they insisted on paying Perrot ten beaver- 
skins. They believed, what no doctor has been able to beat into 
Christian patients, that no medicine could do any good if it was 
not paid for. 

These patients were Miamis. Tlie Sauks, on the other hand, 
thought no medicine efficacious unless it was bestowed without 
money and without price. One of their tribe who had been badly 
scalded, declared himself cured the moment he was presented 
with a gratuitous plug of tobacco. 

Relish for the romantic was a considerable element even in mis- 
sionary zeal. Thus Hennepin admits that a passion for travel and 
a burning desire to visit strange lands had no small part in his 
own inclination for missions. 

Again, many early bush-rangers belonged to that class who 
would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. La Salle fell in 
with one tribe in mourning for wthe death of a chief, and he said : 
"Dry your tears ! I will raise him from the dead. Whatever he 
was to wife, children or tribe, that I will be, feeding them and 
fighting for them. He is dead no longer." Thereupon he was 
hailed as chief. 

Still others dashed among distant cannibals, in hopes, like Brig- 
ham Young among Mormons, to become Gods on earth. It paid 
for all privations to hear cringing Calibans cry out : •' We pray 
thee be our God ! We'll fish for thee ; we'll kiss thy foot." 

Saint Castine, who had nothing saintly but the name, roaming 
with Indians not far from the seaport in Maine which keeps ^his 
name in memory, gained such a supremacy that his aboriginal as- 
sociates deemed him the prince of the power of the air. 

In 1683, Perrot having built a fort near the outlet of Lake 
Pepin, paid a visit to the Sioux up the great river. He was 
placed by them on their car of state, which was a buffalo robe. 
He was thus lifted on high by a score of warriors, not like Sancho 
Panza tossed in a blanket, but borne as reverentially as the Pope 



13 



on hig sedia gestqtoria, or portable throne, into the house of council. 
There, holding a bowl of brandy which the Indians thought to 
be water, he set it on fire. He thus made them believe that he 
oould at will burn up their lakes and rivers. A score of years 
before, — certainly as early as 1665, — he had become a potentate 
among Pottawatomies near Green Bay. Perrot was worshipped 
with clouds of incense from a hundred calumets, because he 
brought iron, — especially in the shape of guns and tomahawks. 
The further west he went the more unheard of his iron and pow- 
der, and the more they proved him a God. 

One mode of reverence was to break off branches of trees and 
sweep the path his feet were about to tread. But the divine honors 
paid to Perrot were not always delightful. The lowas, whom he 
pronounces the greatest weepers in the world, wept most effusively 
at his coming. Their welcome, he tells us, was bathing his face 
with their tears — "the effusions of their eyes, and alas! of their 
mouths and noses too ! " 

Other French adventurers threw up rockets, and thus record the 
sensation : " When the Indians saw the fireworks in the air and 
the stars fall from heaven, the women and children began to fly, 
and the most courageous of the men to cry for mercy and implore 
us very earnestly to stop the play of that wonderful medicine. 
Had there been any accidental explosion of chemicals so that 
one of the braves was blown up, he would have deemed it all a 
part of the show, and as soon as he caught breath would have 
exclaimed : ' What next ? What in the world will these magi- 
cians do next?' " 

The simplest French conveniences were sublime in aboriginal 
eyes. Tbe Mascoutins, when Perrot appeared among them, knew 
no mode of producing fire except by rubbing two sticks together. 
Such friction was ineffectual whenever the sticks were iat all wet, 
and they were often too damp to kindle — an Irishman would 
say — till one had made a fire and dried them. Naturally, Per- 
rot's tinder-box was venerated as an angel from heaven. No 
wonder that a hundred dozen of these Promethean fire-bringers 
are set. down in the outfit of La Salle. One of an antique pat- 
tern, lately discovered in an Illinois cave, was shown me in 



14 

Ottawa. Possibly it is one of the twelve hundred imported by 
La Salle. Had lucifera been known to the French, starting 
camp-fires in a twinkling, they must have converted every Indian 
into a fire- worshipper and conquered the continent. 

The Indians wished that their children should grow up bald, 
aside from scalp locks. Their style of hair-catting had been to 
burn childish scalps with red hot stones. Hennepin's razor, 
though none of the keenest, was clearly a better depilatory, and 
so was hailed as a miracle of mercy. 

Nicollet met in council four thousand Wisconsin warriors, who 
feasted on six score of beaver. He appeared before them in a 
many-colored robe of state, adorned with flowers and birds. 
Approaching with a pistol in each hand, he fired both at once. 
The natives hence named him "thunder-bearer." Such a spec- 
tacular display was in keeping with the policy which marked the 
old French regime in two worlds, and which for centuries proved 
equally sovereign in both. The apotheosis of Nicollet would 
have been complete if he could have carried a Colt revolver — 
the thunderbolt of Jove in the thimble of Minerva, omnipotent 
as ever, yet so small that Cupid would steal it, as no longer too 
heavy for him to lift or too hot for him to handle. 

Of all Europeans the French only gained the affections of 
natives. From the beginning they fraternized with them as the 
British never could. 

They never sold Indian captives for slaves on southern planta- 
tions as the English did. Through hatred of New Englanders 
fifty families of Indians there flying west became retainers of La 
Salle, and some of them were his most trusty oarsmen and braves 
in discovering the Mississippi. Four score years, said La Salle, 
have we had Indian allies. Never has one of them proved false 
to France. We can safely trust them with arms. From first to 
last the Illinois tribes were faithful to the French. When the 
French, after their loss of Illinois, went west of the Mississippi 
in 1763, the Indians followed them. Each tribe loved the French 
with an affection so ardent as to be jealous, and strove to keep 
them all to itself, resenting their dealing with any other tribe as a 
sort of adulterous infidelity. For a score of years Nicholas 



15 



Perrot won golden opinions among the Outagamies. After his de- 
parture they declared in council with the governor of Canada, 
that their fathers having gone they had no more any breath, or 
soul. 

The French captivated the Indians and the Indians captivated 
them. For them, then, there was a fullness of fun — yes paradise 
where John Bull would have felt himself in such a purgatory that 
he could not fare worse by going farther. 

One Englishman who had been forced to make trial of savage 
life, when asked how he liked it, answered : " The more I see In- 
dians, the better I love dogs." But amid the same horrors a 
Frenchman enjoyed himself so well that he declares he was ready 
to burn his cook books ! What could Frenchman do more ? 

In no long time most northwestern tribes were tinctured with 
French blood. Perrot treats of French among fugitive Sauteurs 
on the south shore of Lake Superior as early as 1661. The 
first permanent settler in Wisconsin, Charles Langlade, was 
a French half-breed. So was was the first squatter at Madison — 
(long before the Peck family), St. Cyr, the only saint we could 
ever boast. In 1816, when the United States forces took posses- 
sion of Wisconsin, the natives being assembled for treaties, said: 
" Pray do not disturb our French brothers. 

Adventurers among western aborigines in time became far- 
traders or interpreters and factors for such traders, as well as mis- 
sionaries or other officials both military and civil. But their 
Jirst impulse to plunge into the depth of the wilderness, and to 
abide there, was because they liked it. To their imaginations 
forest-life was as charming as the grand tour of Europe a genera- 
tion ago to ours, or as is girdling the terraqueous globe at the 
present day, or as roughing it on the Yellowstone to G-eneral 
Sherman, or on the great divide to Lord Dufferin, or rounding 
the world on horseback to Sir Greorge Simpson, or Beltrami's sol- 
itary scamper to the sources of the Mississippi, or the three years 
cruise of the Challenger to Lord Campbell, whose Log Letters 
skimming off the cream of all climes and finding no drop sour, 
cry out in every line, " what Fun ! " It was much more than 
all this, and can only be compared to the wild dedication of him- 



16 

self to unpathed waters, undreamed shores and sands and miser- 
ies enough by Stanley, in quest of Livingston, or the sources of 
the Nile and Congo. 

Seekers of pleasure in the pathless woods followed Nicollet 
into Wisconsin, as well as elsewhere in the Mississippi Valley. 
Their race endured, and it still endures. Some survivals of it 
were met with in the first decade of our century far up the Mis- 
souri, by Lewis and Clark, and by Pike at the sources of the 
Mississippi. Within the last ten years, the British Major Batler, 
with whom I traveled down the Eed River of the North in 1872, 
encountered them on his pilgrimages throughout the great lone 
land and the wild north land to the shores of the Pacific. 

Enamoured of wild sports, the French more than two centuries 
ago rushed from Lower Canada into the borders of the Upper 
Lakes. They came the sooner thanks to unrivaled facilities for 
boating, hunting and fishing, — to an appetite for open air which 
grows by what it feeds on, — to their feeling at home in wigwams, 
to their passion to break loose from law martial and monkish, and 
to enjoy unbounded license, as well as to the pre eminence which 
knowledge gave them among barbarians. To the love of fun, 
then, and the full feast of it fresh as the woods and waters that 
inspired it, — with which he could fill himself in western wilds, 
we in Wisconsin owe the explorations of Nicollet and others of 
like temper, and so our most ancient historic land marks. One 
of the first French foundations here was laid in fun. Fun then 
was /imdamental. 

But if fun led the way to exploring the far West, faith also 
was there, and not least in Wisconsin, a French foundation. 

Faith followed hard after fun, and sometimes outstripped it. 
The friar, Le Caron, was on Lake Huron before Nicollet had pene- 
trated half way there. Nicollet lingered in the Isle of Allumette, 
several hundred miles short of Lake Huron, till 1620. But, 
five years earlier, mass had been already said on that lake by the 
Franciscan with sandaled feet and girt with his knotted cord. 
The monk's passage had been paid by the governor, but he worked 
his own passage and that bare- footed, since shoes would injure the 
bark canoe. He thus wrote to his superior : " It would be hard 



17 

to tell you how tired I was with paddling all day among the In- 
dians, wading the rapids a hundred times and more, through mud 
and over sharp stones that cut my feet, carrying the canoe and 
luggage through the woods to avoid cataracts, and half starved 
the while, for we had nothing to eat but porridge, of water and 
pounded maize, of which they gave me a very small allowance." 
Through the winter of 1615 in a hermitage a thousand miles west 
of Quebec which was itself an ultima Thule, — this friar was mak- 
ing catechisms or struggling with the difficulties of the Huron 
tongue, or expounding the faith in broken Indian, and by way of 
object lesson showing "four great likenesses of the Madonna sus- 
pended on a cord." 

As early as 1614, when the French first ascended the Ottawa, 
they planted crosses of white cedar on its shores and islands. In 
1625 the Jesuit Brebeuf began a three years' sojourn on Huron 
waters. Onward from 1631 a permanent mission was maintained 
there for fifteen years until the Hurons were scattered to the four 
winds. Missionaries followed them in their dispersion. In sum- 
mer plying the paddle all day or toiling through pathless thickets, 
bending under a canoe or portable chapel heavy as a peddler's 
pack, veritable colporters, while famine, snow storms, cold, treach- 
erous ice of the lake, smoke and filth were the luxuries of their 
winter wanderings, "We underrate the arduousness of mission 
journeys until we consider how greatly storms, cold and famine 
retarded them. Allouer's voyage from Mackinaw to Green Bay 
consumed thirty-one days. Marquette was ten days more on his 
passage from Green Bay to Chicago. 

Yet, in 1612, Madame de la Peltrie, — a tender and delicate 
woman, — reared in Parisian refinements, was seized at Quebec 
with a longing to visit the Hurons, and to preach in person at that 
most arduous station. In 1611, the year before one house was 
built in Montreal, Fathers Jogues and Raymbault were distribut- 
ing rosaries at tBe mouth of Lake Superior. Previous to 1640 
they had become acquainted with Wisconsin Winnebagoes. The 
earliest Iroquois baptism was in 1669, but thirty years before, 
scores of Hurons had been baptized hundreds of leagues further 
west. 

2b 



18 

The first clear trace of a priest in Wisconsin was in 1660. In 
that year Father Menard, paddling along the south shore of Lake 
Superior for many a weary week, near its western extremity, 
reached La Pointe — one of the most northern peninsulas in the 
region which is now Wisconsin. 

"He evangelized the natives who flocked together there." 
Such are the words of the old chronicler. The meaning is, not 
that the Jesuit dispensed the whole gospel to the Indians, nor yet 
all that he could give, but only so much of it, such a homoeo- 
pathic dose — as they would receive. 

Early travelers into the Orient when they there met certain 
albinos thought them the posterity of blacks converted by St. 
Thomas and whitened by baptism. It seemed doubtful, how- 
ever, whether such a skin-bleaching was a real improvement. In 
like manner, may it be questioned whether the western mission- 
aries who had chosen St. Thomas for their patron were any more 
successful than he. 

However we may speculate on this matter, we must feel that 
Menard's motives were the best. Sometimes he had no altar but 
his paddles supported by croiched sticks and covered with his 
sail. Moreover, he dared not celebrate mass in the presence of 
those he had there baptized, because it was beyond his power to 
convince them that that sacrament was not a juggling trick to se- 
cure for the priest slaves in the life beyond life. Father Allouez 
was less scrupulous. He boasts as of some great thing that he 
had taught one Wisconsin tribe to make the sign of the cross 
and to daub its figure on their shields. When one of these con- 
verts had married three sisters at once and was censured for it by 
La Salle, his defense was : " I was made a Christian against my 
will by Father Allouez." In 1672 this father was welcomed by 
Mascoutins whose head-center seems to have been not far from 
Portage City. 

With Father Menard, in 1660, were three lay-iielpers, whom he 
next year dispatched southward into Wisconsin to certain Hurons 
who had sought an asylum at the mouth of Green Bay. Having 
labored nine years for those Hurons in their old home, he soon 
followed his fugitive converts, but perished in the wilderness of the 



19 

Black river. It is believed that he was murdered by the Sioux, 
for among them his breviary and robe were discovered years 
afterward. That stream, now called Bois BruU^ forms the bound- 
ary between Wisconsin and Michigan, and it is not known on 
which side of it Menard lost his life. Both states may, therefore, 
with equal plausibility, glory in him as their own protomartyr. 
Wading through the sodden snow, under the bare and dripping 
forests, drenched with rains, braving every variety of unknown 
horror, faint, yet pursuing to the last, well may we, people of both 
states, count him worthy of double honor! Doubtless his last re- 
gret was that he had not a whole life to lay down for the salvation 
of each state. 

Four years after, in 1665, Father AUouez succeeded Menard at 
La Pointe, and carried on his work. Very likely, as in the early 
days of Montreal, his only altar lamp was a vial full of fire flies. 
When he returned to Quebec for reenforcements, he remained 
there only two nights before starting back again with volunteer 
co-workers. La Pointe was then a four months' voyage from 
Quebec. He was saying mass at Grreen Bay to six hundred In- 
dians and eight French traders in 1669, and the next year exhib- 
ited a picture of the last judgment, at Neenah, on Lake Winne- 
bago. A silver monstrance, the case in which the sacramental 
wafer is held up for veneration, presented to the chapel of Allouez 
by the French governor, Nicolas Perrot, and bearing the date of 
1686, was dug up, in 1802, at De Pere near the head of Green 
Bay, and is now treasured in the ambry of the cathedral there. 
In 1671, a chart (34x38 centimeterd) was drawn, entitled iya/ctf 
Tracy or Superior, with the dependencies of the Mission of the 
Holy Spirit [that is La Pointe']. It is still extant in Parisian ar- 
chives, at the depot of marine charts. Two years later in the 
Jesuit relation of 1673, a map of their missions on the Lake of 
the Illinois [that is Michigan] was published. 

In the same year the first white men, one of them a missionary, 
of whose journey a contemporary record remains, crossedjWis- 
consin from east to west. These adventurers were Joliet and 
Marquette — a noble brace of brothers. Equals in enthusiasm, 
the faith of Marquette, the Jesuit, rivaled the rage for discovery 



20 

in Joliet, the officer. These explorers were cultivated men, and 
experienced observers. For five years Marquette had been a 
western pioneer, partly in Wisconsin, and Joliet, while voyaging 
on Lake Superior some time before, had also probably trod Wis- 
consin soil. From Indian reports they had drawn a map of 
the region they purposed to penetrate, and kept it at hand as they 
rowed up Fox river, threaded the marshy maze at the grand 
divide and carrying place ^ — ■ now Portage City — and among herds 
of elk and deer, floated down the Wisconsin to the great river. 
Reaching this grand goal on the seventeenth of June, they glided 
with the current of the Mississippi for a month, and probably to 
the latitude of Memphis, which, according to their belief, was no 
more than two degrees north of the Mexican Gulf. 

On the return voyage Joliet wintered at Green Bay, where he 
had found many good Christians the spring before. The next 
season, when he was about to land at Montreal, his boat capsized 
and he was only rescued himself after being four hours in the 
water. His journal was lost — a sad loss for Wisconsin, which 
was thus bereaved of the wayside notes of the earliest traveler 
throughout its whole breadth — a record which who would will- 
ingly let drown ? 

After all who knows but Joliet's loss may have turned out for 
our gain? and will still? Who shall count the investigators 
that, mourning for Joliet's misfortune, have thus, or shall, become 
doubly zealous to gather up and commit to the custody of our 
Historical Society — or of the art preservative of all arts — 
every fragment of our annals, letting nothing — no fraction — be 
lost? 

Throughout the last third of the seventeenth century and in 
all generations since, priests of the Catholic faith may be traced 
in or near Wisconsin. There Allouez labored for a quarter of a 
century onward from 1665. In 1677 Frontenac speaks of the 
Green Bay mission as no new thing. All tribes near that Bay 
are mentioned in the missionary report for 1658. In 1680 and 
for seven years thereafter, Enjalran was stationed there. He had 
been preceded there by Fathers Andre and Albanel, and within a 
decade was followed by Nouvel, and three others whose names 



21 

are preserved. As early as 1671 their headquarters were Macki- 
naw, but they were constantly making excursions and establishing 
out-stations in the parts beyond. In 1721 Father Chardon had 
already labored among the Sacs about Green Bay till he had 
given them up as beyond hope, and was studying Winnebago in 
order to preach to the tribe of that name. Other missionaries are 
mentioned at later periods, and the town of De Pere, meaning 
Fathers^ is said to derive its name from the fact that two Jesuits 
suffered martyrdom there in 1765. In the interior of Wisconsin 
there were also stations among the Kickapoos and Menomonies. 
Downward from the expedition of Joliet and Marquette, Wis- 
consin was the favorite thoroughfare of missionaries as well as 
others bound for the southwest. Such way-farers shunned the 
east shore of Lake Michigan as infested by the Iroquois. If tbey 
could buy permission of the Foxes they glided down the Wis- 
consin river as the shortest and easiest route. Those who failed 
to win Indian favor paddled along the Wisconsin shore of Lake 
Michigan. 

It is a natural question, " What brought the Catholic fathers to 
the farthest west at so early a day, while Protestant missionaries, 
though abroad in New England before one European dwelt in 
Montreal, had not penetrated half-way to the Hudson river?" 

It might have been predicted from the out-set by a philosoph- 
ical historian, that French missionaries would out-do all others 
among our aborigines. They had already showed themselves 
pre-eminent elsewhere. The French originated the crusades, and 
from first to last they were the chief crusaders. It was natural 
for them, changing tactics with the times, to be as zealous against 
the infidels of the Occident as they had approved themselves 
against those of the orient, and as persistent with litany and mass 
as they had been with lance and mace. The presence and per- 
sistence of Jesuits on our upper lakes and beyond them, more 
than two centuries ago, is accounted for by one single word — 
yes, by one syllable, namely Faith — their peculiar faith. 

The views I now present of Jesuit missions are of course those 
of a non-Catholic. They must be or they could not be my own, 
and no one would wish me either to dissimulate my own opinions 



22 



or to simulate those of others. My information, however, all 
comes from Catholic witnesses. No others existed then and there. 

My account of the French missionaries must be the more one- 
sided because my present purpose will not let me expatiate upon 
their tact patience and heroic endurance amid all vexations, cul- 
minating in martyrdom. In temptations which we cannot bear 
to read of, their virtues found a lit emblem in that light from 
heaven which they came to bring, — sunbeams which, descending 
to the lowest depths of earth, and however reflected and refracted 
in abodes of pollution, remain unsullied and continue sunbeams 
still. 

The Jesuits are the Pope's standing army (Loyola's own name 
for them was a battalion), and the title of their head is general. 
At the beck of superiors subordinates plunged into the vast un- 
known of our continent with the unquestioning alacrity of regular 

troops. 

Not theirs to question why, 
Not theirs to make reply; 
Theirs but to do, or die. 

They knew no west or east, no north or south. 

But in addition to his vow of obedience, each missionary was 
impelled by a faith which inspired him with tenfold more zeal 
and intrepidity. That faith was this : that he bestowed a clear 
title to heaven on all whom he baptized, unless they lived to com- 
mit mortal sins afterward. Hence when one had sprinkled a 
couple of dying children he writes in his diary : " Two little 
Indians changed to-day into two angels, by one drop of water. 
O, my rapture as I saw them expire two hours after baptism." 
No matter though the sprinkling was effected by pious fraud, 
when Jesuits unable otherwise to approach sick infants, pretended 
to administer a medicine of sweetened water, but spilled some 
drops of it on their heated brows, while whispering sacramental 
words with motionless lips. The little ones were sent to paradise 
by these waters none the less surely because secretly. Seeing 
that death quickly followed baptism, Indians soon inferred that it 
was occasioned by those priestly drops. They were hence prone 
to scalp a Father if they detected him administering the sacred 
rite. 



23 



We hear with a shock of burning prisoners alive. Bat the 
fathers had little to saj against the custom. On the other hand, 
such an execution seemed to them a means of conversion akin to 
a Spanish at^fo (^«/e, ai^d equally efficacious. One of the mission- 
aries wrote home as follows.: 

" An Iroquois was to be burned some way off. What consolation 
is it to set forth in the hottest summer to deliver this victim from 
hell. The father approaches, and instructs him even in the midst 
of his torments. Forthwith the faith finds a place in his heart. 
He adores as the author of his life Him whose name he had 
never heard till the hour of his own death. He receives baptism, 
and in his place of torture cries: "I am about to die but I go to 
dwell in heaven." How history repeats itself ! In 1877 the last 
words of Henry Norfolk on the scaffold in Annapolis were : " I 
am here to hang for the murder of my wife, but I thank God I 
am going to glory !" 

Again, the record is : On the day of the visitation of the Holy 
Yirgin, the chief Aontarisati was taken prisoner by our Indians, 
instructed by our fathers, baptized, burnt, and ascended to heaven, 
all on the same day. I doubt not that he thanked the Virgin for 
his misfortune and the blessing that followed, Happy thought! 

Another missionai-y writes : " We have very rarely indeed seen 
the burning of an Iroquois without feeling sure that he was on 
the path to Paradise, and we never knew one of them to be on 
that path without seeing him burnt." Happy thought. 

The conclusion of the whole matter then is : " The only way to 
save Indians is to burn them," or as they now say in Texas: 
" Scalp them first, and then preach to them." 

Powerful motives then hurried the Jesuits wherever an infant 
was death-struck, or a captive in torture. 

Various secular influences speeded the missionaries on their 
western way. 

i 

First, the spirit of religion was reinforced by that passion for ro- 
mantic adventure which we have just been surveying. Then, 
according to Father Biard, the French king, the most dissolute of 
men, initiated the Jesuit project. Preachers who were over- 
zealous he liked to ship off, and so transfer their soul-stinging ser- 



24: 

mons to the other aide of the Atlantic. He thus parried thrusts 
which might have hit his conscience more eflfectuallj, and yet 
more covertly, than the German duke can whose cathedral pew is 
hedged about with sliding windows, so that, when he pleases, he 
can shut out unpalatable doctrines. Again, the French mon- 
arch was as liberal in land-grants to Canadian priests as our con- 
gress has been to railroads. 

Many of his courtiers too, whose idea of Lent was a month 
when they hired their servants to fast for them, paid roundly for 
sending so much gospel to the heathen as to leave very little of 
it for themselves. Others too who would not give a sou of their 
own money importuned their neighbors till they forced them to 
contribute, as the fox while sparing his own fur tore skin off the 
bear's back to make a plaster for the sick lion. Such beggary 
they thought was a means of grace. 

While in lower Canada the Jesuits were to some extent subject 
to the secular arm, and occasionally were forced to beg the gov- 
ernor's pardon. The powers that were said to them : " Show us 
the way to heaven, but we will show you yours on the earth." 
When a Jesuit in a Quebec pulpit declared the King had ex- 
ceeded his powers by licensing the trade in brandy in spite of the 
bishop's interdict, the governor, Frontenac, threatened to put him 
in a place where he would learn to hold his peace. 

The same magistrate sent another priest — brother of the author 
of Telemachus — to France for trial owing to some disrespect, and 
wrote to the king : " The ecclesiastics want to join to their spirit- 
ual authority an absolute power over things temporal. They aim 
to establish an inquisition worse than that of Spain." 

Amid this conflict of authorities the government was glad to 
transport the missionaries, and they were equally glad to be trans- 
ported deep into the wilderness; for there all power in heaven and 
on earth, temporal and spiritual alike, and each doubling the 
other, was theirs, theirs alone, without rival. Every whisper 
against them was admitted to be " injurious to the glory of God." 
They held it better to reign monarchs of all they surveyed among 
Menomonies than to hold divided empire in Montreal. 

When once the Jesuits were planted in the far west they suf- 



25 

fered no more from'governmental jealousies. On the other hand 
trade-policy and military power leaned on missions as their main 
support. Missions were to explore the Mississippi, missions were 
to win over savage hordes at once to the faith and to France. At 
a momentous crisis, in 1685, the Jesuit, Bngelran, at Mackinaw 
adroitly kept the lake tribes from defection. The Marquis Du 
Quesne used to say that Father Picquet was worth ten regiments. 
One tribe was taught by the Fathers that Christ was a Frenchman 
murdered by the English, and that the way to gain his favor was 
to revenge his death. No wonder a chief called out, " O, that I 
and my braves had caught those English crucifiers. We would 
have taken off all their scalps." 

In those times, when the question arose which we are still vainly 
essaying to answer, " How was America peopled ? how came the 
Aborigines here ? " it was a common saying of theologians that 
the devil had led the Indians hither that they might be out of the 
way of the gospel. Accordingly, whoever penetrated into the 
utmost corner of the West was sure that he beyond all others 
was storming the'donjon keep of Satan. 

This Jesuit storming party, full of hope and misnamed forlorn,, 
roved at will without passports, while others, if they lacked such 
credentials, were put to death. 

Their first acquaintance with mosquitoes is thus recorded : " The 
woods were full of a species of flies similar to the gnats which in 
France are called cousins (that is, I suppose, ' poor relations '). 
They are so importunate that one always has a multitude around 
him watching for a chance to light on his face or on some part of 
his body where the covering is so thin that their stings can easily 
pierce it. As soon as they light they draw out blood and substi- 
tute for it venom, which excites a strange uneasiness and a tumor 
of two or three hours' duration." When they first saw a fire- fly 
they must have thought like Paddy that a mosquito had taken a 
lantern in order to find his victims in the dark. 

In sending their underlings into the heart of New France, 
Jesuit superiors were assured they could there repeat those 
miracles of conversion and reconstruction which their order had 
lately wrought in South America. 



26 

In Paraguay they had built up a model state. The natives be- 
came tolerant of their culture and compliant to their bidding in 
every particular. They rose and sought their beds, were married 
and given in marriage, weaned their children, removed from place 
to place, raised stock or grain, fixed prices, and used their gains 
at the dictation of spiritual guides. They were docile, but unde- 
veloped, or developed only in some single prescribed direction. 
They were literally sheep, submissive when fleeced and even 
flayed and slaughtered at the pleasure of their shepherds. But 
their development was arrested. At their best they never became 
men, but remained children of larger growth, or rather became 
weaker in mind as they grew stronger in muscle. The purpose 
was to build up a second Paraguay in North America. An ex- 
periment, tried in Lower Canada, had failed. Its want of success 
was attributed to the roving habits of the tribes and the impossi- 
bility of persuading them to renounce nomadic life. It was tried 
again, with more sanguine hopes, on Lake Huron, for the tribes 
there were fixed through the year in one abode. When the Hurons 
had been overpowered by foes and driven into Wisconsin, the 
experiment was repeated there. 

The westward exodus of Hurons into Wisconsin began as early 
as 1650. Onward from that time the French became known there, 
and that most favorably, as a race superhuman in arms, in arts 
and in benevolence. Such must have been the report concerning 
them which fell from the lips of fugitive converts. It roused the 
braves on the farthest shores of the farthest lakes to set sail in 
quest of the admirable strangers. 

Missionaries were the more encouraged to venture far west ; 
thanks to invitations from the aborigines. 2Vs early as 1611, the 
first fleet of Hurons that descended the St. Lawrence to meet 
Champlain said to him, " Come to our country, teach us the true 
faith." Iq 1633 it is chronicled that Hurons vied with each other 
for the honor of carrying missionaries home with them in their 
boats of bark. The volume of Jesuit Relations for 1640, states 
that fathers, invited by Algonquins on Lake Superior, were on 
the point of pushing forward even to that most western sea. 

In 1679 an Outagarai chief, espying friars among La Salle's com- 



27 

pany near Chicago, cried out : " We love those gray robes. They 
go barefoot as we do ; they care nothing for beaver ; they have no 
arms to kill us; they fondle our infants ; they have given up every- 
thing to abide with us. So we learn from our people who have 
been to carry fur to French villages." 

Stations far inland and dissevered from their base on the sea- 
board, were also preferred as being undisturbed by the influx and 
influence of non-missionary and anti-missionary whites, — godless 
sailers who swarmed on the rock of Quebec, — and above all from 
the heretical psalmody of Huguenots which could not there be 
silenced. 

Aside from the moral advantages of a mission in the heart of 
the land, the fathers and their employes, whether paid or volun- 
teering without pay, were most numerous and useful when remote 
from other whites, because they were able to push trade in fur, 
free from competitors. The lay brothers together with brandy 
sold scapularies or belts of the Virgin which were of such sovereign 
virtue that nobody who wore one at his death could possibly sink 
to perdition. The missionaries, according to Grovernor Frontenac, 
wished to keep out of sight the trade which they always carried on 
In the woods. They also claimed that their profits never exceeded 
five hundred per cent. Parkman wrote his Jesuits more than a 
decade ago. He was then doubtful whether those missionaries 
engaged in fur trading, ^utthe letters of Frontenac, often writ- 
ten in cipher for secrecy (lately discovered by P. Margry and pub- 
lished by our congress), leave us no doubt on this point. In 1674 
he wrote Colbert that when he ursjed the Black Robes to labor near 
white settlements, they answered that their coming into America 
was to indoctrinate savages — or rather to draw in beaver. He 
accuses them of dealing in peltries. In 1682 La Salle wrote that 
the Green Bay Jesuits held the real key of the castor country, 
while their blacksmith brother and his two helpers converted 
more iron into fur than all the fathers could turn pagans into 
proselytes. 

A further narrative by La Salle regarding Jesuit tactics, reads 
as follows: "A savage named Kiskirinaro, that is to say, Wild Ox, 
of the Mascoutin tribe, a considerable war chief among his people. 



28 

says that in a little river to whicli he wished to lead me, he had 
picked up a quantity of white metal, a portion of which he brought 
to Father Allouez, a Jesuit, and that brother Giles, a goldsmith 
who resides at Green Bay (" the bay of the Puans "), having 
wrought it, made the sun-shaped article [soleil] in which they put 
the holy bread. He meant the ostensory which this same brother 
has there made. He says that Father Allouez gave him a good 
deal of merchandise by way of recompense, and told him to keep 
the matter secret because [the metal] was a manitou — this is to 
say a great spirit who was not yet developed." 

Nor were the most distant fathers altogether at the mercy of 
savages. A seminary for Huron boys at Quebec was projected in 
the outset, and was begun in 1636, two years before the building 
of Harvard College. One reason for founding this educational in- 
stitution was that the Indian children in this Do-tbe-Boys Hall, 
would be hostages for the safety of missionaries, however distant 
in the interior. 

It is a merciful ordination of Providence that the tragic sug- 
gests the comic, and all miseries have a ludicrous side. 

The crew of Captain Nares in quest of the North Pole would 
have died of hypo in a darkness which outlasted a hundred times 
the space that measures day and night to us, had they not dipped 
deep in comic theatricals. Nor in the worse than Arctic gloom 
around them would the Jesuits have fared better, had not their 
eyes now and then rested on a silver lining of their sable cloud. 
Burdens, otherwise too heavy, they threw off by sportive notes 
in their diaries. Thus they must have felt a grim pleasure in 
writing down skunks as infants of the devil. Father Allouez 
relates that while publishing the gospel in the midst of Wiscon- 
sin he found himself in a sort of monkey France. Certain of the 
sequestered natives having carried beaver to Montreal had there 
beheld military pomp. Wishing to pay the missionary fitting 
honors, they stuck feathers in their hair, and organized the naked 
braves into a militia company who gravely mimicked every 
evolution of the governor's guard. The Jesuit discoursed to 
them ot heaven and hell, but the unseasonable parody of French 
parade did not cease for an instant. The Black Robe could not 



29 

keep his countenance, but his guard of honor did keep theirs. 
Every savage executed every punctilio of his part with more than 
Spanish gravity. 

When an Indian had been so scalded as to lose the skin of his 
face, a Jesuit writes : "It would have been very well if he had 
lost his old heart with his old hide." 

Another Huron, finding no missionary assurance that there was 
tobacco in heaven, declared he would never go there. The re- 
flection chronicled by the Father is : " Unhappy infidel ! all his 
time spent in smoke and his eternity in fire." 

Eobes and ritual inspired a divine awe. This was sometimes 
betrayed in odd ways. No Black Robe's risibles could remain 
unmoved when he overheard converts who feared to address a 
missionary, but asked the most solemn questions of his dog. 

Again, certain Christian Indians having caught a warrior of a 
heathen tribe, named Wolf, the Jesuits let them burn him, having 
first instructed and baptized him. Then with a pun on his name 
they recorded it as a marvel indeed, that a Wolf was at one 
stroke changed into a lamb ; and through the baptism of fire 
entered at once into that fold which he came to ravage. 

Priestly humor was sometimes unconscious. Thus Hennepin re- 
marks that no sooner had he declared a fraction of the heroic 
virtues of " the most high, puissant, most invincible " (Almighty? 
no ! but) King of France, to savages" than they at once " received 
the gospel and revered the cross." 

Again when he had set forth certain mysteries the Indians told 
him some of their fables. But these, he told them, were false. 
Their answer was, we believed your lies ; had you been as polite 
as we were, you would have believed ours." Again, the question 
whether the quid of a tobacco chewer, taken in the morning 
before mass, broke his fast, was discussed pro and con by casuists. 
To them it seemed a question altogether serious, however ludi- 
crous on all sides it appears to us. 

Again, when they noticed that a certain hear dies s'^nes.i was a 
special favorite with natives, they sent to France for pictures of 
Christ painted without a beard. 

After some analogous scrutiny of Indian tastes they wrote in 



30 

their next order for paintings, " one view of celestial rapture is 
enough, but you cannot send too many scenes of infernal torments." 

Again, " if three four or five devils were painted torturing a 
soul with different punishments, one applying fire, another ser- 
pents, another tearing him with pincers, another holding bim fast 
with a chain, this would have a good effect, especially if every- 
thing were made distinct, and misery, rage and desperation ap- 
peared plainly in the victim's face." 

Within fifteen years after Jesuits began work in earnest among 
Hurons, that tribe was either annihilated or expelled by the Iro- 
quois. But for that catastrophe the faith of the Jesuit might 
have been to this day more dominant in Upper Canada than it is 
in Lower. 

Some tincture of it has survived everything in all Indian dis- 
persions. One of the first English adventurers to Maine was 
greeted by the natives with a pantomime of bows and flourishes 
which in his judgment could have been learned of nobody but a 
Frenchman. The aborigines in general were inoculated with 
French faith and French fashions so that they took about as much 
of one as of the other, — and not much of either. Disciples who 
ran wild in the woods retained some prayers and chants learned 
by rote. The divine vision which roused Pontiac and his com- 
patriots to war, was a woman arrayed in white. Had they not 
been taught concerning the Virgin Mary, it could hardly have 
taken this form. In 1877, a white man who had been caught by 
a Rocky Mountain tribe chained to his wagon- wheel and half 
burnt, when he made the sign of the cross was snatched out of 
the fire. The hunting camps of tribes in Manitoba are to-day 
called Missions. 

Missionaries, then, burning to propagate their faith, more than 
two centuries ago penetrated into our Northwest, some, of them 
into Wisconsin. They there discovered tribes having fixed abodes, 
over whom their knowledge and tact gave them power, so that 
they molded them as clay in the hand of a potter, where their 
influence was unchecked by white intruders, and where they could 
so trade as to make their enterprise self-supporting. 

The third stepping-stone of the French into the northwest, and 
thus into Wisconsin, was fur. 



31 



The fur trade would have drawn thera thither, even if fun and 
faith had not paved their way. Indeed, that trade began to at- 
tract them to American shores before either fun or faith had 
worked at all in that direction. 

After all, fislc was the JirsL magnet which drew Frenchmen 
across the Atlantic. According to a manuscript in the library at 
Versailles, when Cabot (before Columbus had landed on conti- 
nental America) discovered Newfoundland, he heard the word 
haccalaos there in use for "cod-fish." But " baccalaos" is the Bre- 
ton-French word for that fish. It is possible then that Bretons, 
next to the ISTorse, were the true discoverers of America — pre- 
Columbian and pre-Oabotiaa. 

However this may be, fish, indispensable for fasts and not un- 
welcome at feasts, were sought by Bretons off Newfoundland, a 
centur7 before Quebec was founded. In 1578, there were one 
hundred and fifty French vessels there. 

But peltries, already scarce in Europe, filled the land in that 
quarter no less than fish the sea, and were hunted as early. Before 
the close of the sixteenth century, forty convicts, left on a Nova 
Scotia island, had accumulated a quantity of valuable furs. 

But, what is far more surprising, Menendez relates that fifty- 
five years before the landing from the May Flower — in 1565 — 
buffalo skins had been brought by Indians down the Potomac, 
and thence along shore in canoes to the French about the St. 
Lawrence at the rate of three thousand a year. 

But not content with coast traffic, and with a view to escape the 
rivalry and hostility of Dutch and English, as well as in quest of 
fresh fur fields, traders pushed inland. Before the year 1600 they 
had a post at Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, and in 
1603 established themselves at Quebec. 

To this emporium Indian flotillas, year by year larger and 
larger, and from districts more and more remote, resorted. They 
came laden with furs, and drawn thither by what they counted 
miracles of beauty and ingenuity, which, bartered on the coast 
by the first comers, had glided up the St. Lawrence and all 
its tributaries, and even to the great lakes, where beaver were 
most and best. 



32 

They were further attracted by the presents and invitations of 
Champlain, who, in 1615, within seven years after the first tree 
was felled at Quebec, had held councils on Lake Huron, and 
bidden the natives to bring down their furs. Western Indians were 
still more stimulated to traffic by adventurers, who, as we have 
seen, had in 1609 begun to be domesticated among the aborigines 
and to share their hunts. "Wrapped in furs, striding on snow 
shoes with bodies half bent, through the gray forests and frozen 
pine swamps, among black trunks and dark ravines, these young 
Frenchmen, though they meant not so, were commercial travelers, 
and they fulfilled their mission as shrewdly as those who now 
sally from Chicago. Those Chicago emissaries are dextrous deal- 
ers, yet very possibly might learn some new tricks of trade could 
they recover the lost arts of their forerunners whose palace cars 
were bark canoes, and their commercial hotels wigwams. Drum- 
mers from the lake metropolis now encounter men of their own 
stamp from St. Louis. So did the early French agents conflict 
even in Illinois and Michigan with those who had been dispatched 
from the Hudson. la order to get beyond New York competitors, 
the French hurried still further luest than they otherwise would 
have ventured. 

Again, these roving and fraternizing Frenchmen did not long 
go among the aborigines empty-handed, or even selling by sam- 
ples. They took with them into the heart of the land those 
goods — light and cheap — for which the Indian demand was the 
greatest. 

At sight of an iron hatchet, says Perrot, Wisconsin tribes 
raised their eyes blessing heaven for sending them a race able to 
furnish so powerful a deliverer from all their woes. Every bar 
of iron was in their eyes a divinity. But hrandy was from first 
to last the one thing needful in a trader's outfit. It was indeed 
contraband according to the dignitaries of both church and state. 
Yet then as now it had free course on some underground railroad. 
It was more easily carried because, before exposed for sale, it was 
ivatered as profusely as the stock of our railroads. Each gallon 
of proof liquor swelled to six. The lowest price for brandy was 
a chopine for a beaver skin. How much a French chopine 



33 

amounted to you cannot easily learn from books. French and 
English measures were incommensurable. But what I long sought 
in vain, I have learned from the casual remark of an ancient fur- 
trader, that a chopine was so small a quantity as. would not make 
an Indian drunk more than once. An' Indian is quite unlike an 
Irishman. Bat in one thing they agree. Neither is consciously 
guilty of a bull when he says: "Give me the superflaities of life 
and I will give up the necessaries. Traders too scrupulous to sell 
liquor to an Indian, would still exact a beaver of him for a single 
four pound loaf ot bread. 

French c )mmercial men bore a charmed life. The fiercest sav- 
ages spared both them and their goods, lest no more of that desira- 
ble clas^ should come among their tribes. They had too much 
wit to ki 1 the geese who were their only hope of golden eggs. 
La Salle's testimony is: (M. 2,281.) "The savages take better 
care of us French than of their own children. From us only can 
they get guns and good.-=." Hennepin relates that he would have 
been scalped by his Indian captors had they not judged that his 
death would hinder others of his countrymen from bringing them 
iron. 

French traders soon brought with them more merchandise than 
they could transport overland. They were thus led to establish 
trading pos^s on navigab'e streams and at carrying-places. We 
naturally think such commercial stations would be set up first 
along the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario^ those natural highways 
to and from the west. They were not. Those waters were wa-tched 
by the Lvquois ; fiercest in fight of all Indians, foes of France, 
allies of Holland and England. Accordingly the thoroughfare 
of western Indians to Quebec and of French traders to the upper 
lakes, was by the Ottawa^ a river which, lying farther north, was 
comparatively safe from Iroquois ambuscades, which were with 
reason more dreaded than cold, famine, storm and cataract. 

Hence it came to pass that the French while they still knew 
nothing of Lake Erie and Niagara, were familiar with Lake 
Superior. Two of their traders had penetrated into that inland 
sea in 1658. 

Even after the French were at peace with the Indians on the 
3b 



34 



soutli of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, they were no match 
on those waters for Datch acd English rivals in fur tradino^. The 
latter could aftord to pay four times as much ior furs as the French 
could. Nine pence was the export duty on a beaver at New 
York ; in Qaebec it was six times as much. In New York far- 
trade was free. At Qaebec seven hundred crowns were charged 
for permission to send a single boat up ihe Ottawa. Good reason 
then had the French to seek furs so far northwest that they could 
escape European competitors. 

The result was that they had reached Like Huron in 1615, and 
soon hurried on to Michigan, while they had no port on the 
nearer lake, Ontario, till two generations afterward in 1673, when 
they threw up Fort Frontenac at its outlet, where Kingston now 
stands. Its builder, Frontenac, intended it merely as a base of 
operations for fur trade so far west that he would be independent 
of the governor of Montreal. Seven years af:erward in 1679, 
La Salle, having launched the first sloop ever built on Lake Erie, 
voyaged in her through St. Clair, Huron and Michigan to the 
mouth of Green Bay. 

His vessel vv^as there freighted with rich furs, bat as she was 
lost on her first passsage eastward, La Salle's experiment did not 
recommend the lower lakes. On the contrary it tended to make 
the upper, or Ottawa route, more popular than ever. 

The doors into Wisconsin were two, — Li Pointe and Green 
Bay, and these two were about equal favorites. The first mis- 
sionary arrived at La Pointe in 1660. Fur traders came icith him. 
Nine years after, in 1669, when Father Allouez reached Green 
Bay to found a mission, fur traders were on the ground, and had 
become so domineering in that end of the world, that the mis- 
sionary was brought by the Indians from Lake Superior as a 
protector. 

Nicholas Perrot, who in 1683 built a fort near the mouth of the 
Chippewa river, though on the west bank of the Mississippi, had 
entered Green Bay eighteen or twenty years earlier. He wrote 
a volume, — not for publication — but for the information of the 
Canadian government. In this work which was first printed less 
than twenty years ago, in 1864, he describes a score of journeys in 



35 

all parts of Wisconsin, all of them having something to do with 
fur. How fully even in his lifetime the region between Lake 
Michigan and the great river had become known to ihe French, is 
plain from the early geographical names being largely French. 

Le Sueur, who passed up the Mississippi in the year 1700, men- 
tions between the Wisconsin and the St. Croix, six rivers with 
French names, all apparently of long standing. These nvers 
were Aux Canots. Oachee, Aux Ailes, Des Riisins, Pasquilenette 
and Bon Secours. In other parts of Wisconsin not a few French 
names run back as far as these on its western border. 

In l()o4: Father Le Mercier at the outlet of Lake Superiiir 
wrote that about Green Bay, nine days' journey distant, there 
were Algonquin?, and that if thirty French were sent there they 
would not only gain many snuls to God but would receive pecu- 
niary profit, because the finest peltries came from those quarters. 
The next year fifty canoes of ihe-e Indians visited Quebec, and 
thirty Frenchmen returned with them. Among Ottawas between 
Green Bay and Lake Superior French traders are mentioned in 
1659. In 1665 Perrot was buying beaver of Outagamies in or 
near the Wisconsin county in the name of which they still live, 
and in the following year the second flotilla of Pottawatomies bad 
reached Montreal. 

French fur-factors penetrated the further into western fastnesses, 
because by this means they practically enjoyed free- trade. Mak- 
ing bark canoes far inland they evaded the crushing imposts on 
all canoes allowed to pass up. While mother-states were all at 
war, they plied friendly commerce with Dutch and English mid- 
dle-men as well as their Indian confederates. Thus their beaver 
were either exported through New York, dodging the French tax, 
or they were bartered there for blankets cheaper and better than 
were to be had in Canada. 

As a rule the French governor and intendant were at swords' 
points with each other. Each would charge the other with a 
heinous offense — carrying furs to the English province. The 
truth is that each of them was determined to be the onl// sinner 
in that line. Each thus resembled the usurer who was delighted 
with a sermon against usury, paid iov prinling it and said to the 



36 



preacher, " Make more 'such discourses ! Stop everybody from 
taking high interest — except me. Then lean monopolize the 
whole busin^-s." As his rec >mpen'e for risks and outlays in 
westprn di'jcovery, La Sille asked nothing but the exclusive right 
to sell the skins of buffalo'-s. 

Royal mon(\polies of fur trading, lavished in Paris on conit 
favorites or on cor|)o?'ations as the Hundred Associates, crippled 
thut traffic near the coast. But they drove the bulk of that busi- 
m ss into the heart of ihe continent, where it fell into the hands 
uf traders so distint, shrew>l an I self-suffi iing that it could not 
be crippled. Oyer a region vaster than any European kingdom, 
the hush-rangers ca-ried on the fur-trade af(er their own pleasure, 
and laughed at royal restrictions on their dealings. 

In IfJSl Hennepin, at Mackinaw, met with forty two Canadians 
who hid ct)m3 thither to tra le in furs, defiant of the orders of 
their viceroy. Tnese foresters were not without a sort of con- 
science, for they all begged the Jesuit to give them the cord of St. 
Francis, which was believed to make their salvation sure if they 
died wearing it as a girdle, and they all gained their request. 
Hennepiii wis ilieti journeying eastward ifom Green B ly. where 
he had been entertained by the same o'ass of contraban 1 trafficlcers. 
There simihir adventurers — Li Salle informs us — had a perma- 
nent post in 1677, and that bay had even been visited by a brace 
of voyagprs more than twenty years before, in 1654. Before La- 
Salle began his exploration's in 1679, his CTiployes were familiar 
with far western tribe-5. One of them, Accault, had spent two 
winters and a summer in Wisconsin. Before 1680, Duluth, with 
a score of followers, was trading as far inland as the city which 
now bears his name. He proclaimed that he feared no authority 
and would force the government to grant hi.Tn amnesty. (M. 2, 251.) 
The sloop which La Salle in 1679 had dispatched to Niagara 
before he started from Green Bay for Illinois, according to his 
conviction was scuttled by her crew, who plundered her and 
struck into the northwestern wilderne?s, meaning to join hands 
with Daluth. (M. 2, 327.) Years afterward La Salle heard of a 
French captive on the upper Mississippi whom he identified as his 
pilot, and learned that hand-grenades, which could only have come 



37 

from the miss'mg vessel, had been taken by savages from that 
captive. 

In order to buy cheaper of Indian trappers, wandering fur 
hunters would report pedilence as prevailing in Montreal, and thus 
frighten savages from paddling down the river. Such fur factors 
were outlawed on the upper lakes, and they could not dam up 
their outlets, but they intercepted many a flotilla anxiously ex- 
pected from above in Montreal. Thus masters of the situation, 
they resembled those cunning Athenians who Aristophanes tells 
us were suspended in a sort of balloon, stopping incense as it rose 
from Jove's altars, and letting ^no savor of it reach 01yra[)ian 
nostrils, but keeping all for themselves. 

On a long march every thing not totally indispensable is dropped. 
Hence the far western dealer carried no scales or steel yards. But 
he was himself a better weighing machine, for himself at least, 
than any witty invention of Fairbanks with all Howe's improve- 
ments superadded. So the saying was about Du'uth: " Duluth, 
an honest man, bought all by weight, and made the ignorant 
savages believe that his right foot exactly weighel a pound. By 
this for many years he bought their furs, and died in quiet like 
an honest dealer." 

In selling to Indians, however, the pound was no doubt quite a 
different weight. In the journal of a missionary at the outlet o! 
Lake Superior I find th tt in 1670 a beaver was there valued at 
either four ounces of powder, or one fathom of tobacco, or the 
same length of blue serge or six knives. 

Wood-ranging fur men seemed an evanescent race. Neverthe- 
less they outlasted French empire in America. In latter times 
when English and Yankee fur companies were o'gmized in 
Montreal and New York they were unable to dispense with the 
French operatives, "to the manner born." Generation after gen- 
eration they retained them as practical men fittest for all works 
relating to fur. In all governmental departments the higher 
functiimaries, when first elected (and too often to the very end of 
their career), need to be taught ofiicial routine. H^nce officials 
of lower grade who have learned to run the machine, are retained 
without regard to political revolutions. These factotums are sig- 



nifieantly called "dry-nurses." Such dry-nurses for English and 
American fur kings were discovered in French underlings. 

Fun and faith both gave a new impulse to the fur trade. With 
it they formed a three fold cord which drew the French from end 
to end of the Mississippi, as well as to the farthest fountains of the 
St. Liwrence, and even further. La Salle deserves deathless fame, 
and will have it, because he was first to follow the Mississippi 
down to the gulf. But his grand object was to secure an outlet 
for fur that was not half the year frozen up, and the other half 
infested by English rivals, Iroquois ambushes, and worse than all, 
Canadian farmers of the royal revenue. Duluth, whose name we 
have seen revived and bestowed on a r'nushroom metropolis, "the 
zenith city of the unsalted sea," two centuries ago bad penetrated 
beyond the farthest corner of our innermost and uppermost lake. 
His mission was to intrigue and foil the English on Hudson Bay. 
Ere long a French fort rose on the Saskatchawan, two thousand 
mile-", as men traveled, from the seaboard. This station came up 
under the auspices of the French Company of the Northwest, in- 
corporated in 1676, in antagonism to the Hudson Bay Company, 
which came into existence six years earlier. It long bore sov- 
ereign sway over a wide savage domain. 

The natives preferred the manufactures of the English, but the 
manners of the French, L'ke all savages, they were swayed by 
impulse more than by interest. They would give more for one 
plug of tobacco brought to their wigwams than they could buy 
twenty for in Albany or Hudson Bay. Hence they traded with 
the French, and became their tools. One result was that in 1681, 
and again three years after, Nicolas Perrot, the supreme fur 
trader and Indian negotiator of his time, persuaded five hundred 
Indians from Wisconsin and near it to paddle their canoes all the 
way to Niagara in order to fight for the French. 

In 1724, Bourgmont was already exploring the Upper Missouri. 
But on this line of Western research Yerendrye outstripped all 
others. Pushing on s'ep by step for ten years, he discovered the 
Rocky Mountains in 1743 on New Year's day, sixty-one years 
before our L^wis and Clirke. The point of his discovery was 
just above where the Yellowstone joins the Missouri. That re- 



30 



gion was so fall of fur that the governor's share in the profits of 
a trading company soon amounted to 300,000 francs. 

Those who, from mere love of fun, explored unknown woods 
and waters, learned strange tongues and ceased to be strangers 
among strange tribes, and unawares acquired all the requisites for 
successful commerce in beaver. Missions also, though founded 
in faith, by faith and for faith, furnished as gool a ba?e for the 
enterprises of furriers as if they had owed their origin to the 
spirit of mercantile speculation. 

There is no danger of overrating the pervasiveness of French 
fur dealings in the Northwest centuries ago. We may well be- 
lieve no cove, no navigable stream was unplowed by their boats 
of bark; no tribe, no council unvisited. 

The demand fjr fur in France was stimulated by royal decrees. 
In 1670 one of them prohibited the manufacture of demi-castors, 
a sort of hats that were only half made of beaver. Saon after- 
ward a prohibitory duty was laid in France on all furs not from 
French colonies. 

Statistics are stupefying, and there is some wit in the quip, " A 
fig for your c?a/e5.''" After all a few figures are necessary if we 
would understand how speedily and how grandly the trade in 
skins was developed, or how long and how widely fur was king 
as truly as cjtton or corn has become so in our times. 

In IGLO, ten years before the landing of the forefathers at 
Plymouth, the boats of fur traders were at the outlet of Lake 
Champlain. Three years after forty canoes came down to Mon- 
treal bringing fur. In 1690 their number was 165; three years 
after, it rose to two hundred. For a decade before 1649, the 
Huron beaver harvest was valued at half a million francs a year. 
Fifty francs would then feel a man for a twelvemonth, and one 
hundred and fifty would pay a soldier. In IQl-k, the skins im- 
ported into Il)chelle were 31 1,315. The governor of Montreal, 
whose salary wa-5 a thousand crowns, soon cleared fifty thousand 
by illicit lur dea'irjg. 

As early as 1670 there is mention of a fur fleet embarking at 
Green Bay for Montr<-al. Even before this, as we have seen, ad- 
venturers to Wisconsin waters and its interior, paid the charges 



40 

of exploration bj an incidental trade in far. Just afterward, the 
first Indians whom Marquette met on the Mi-sissippi, were wear- 
ing French cloth. During the winter of 1674-5, when thiit mission- 
ary lay pick at Chicago, two traders were already encamped in the 
vicinity. 

For more than a hundred yenrs, the Northwestern beaver trade 
flowed on with a colossal and all-pervading stream. In 1791, the 
skins collected there for Montreal merchans amounted lo more 
than ha f a million (565,000). A few years after John Jacob 
Astor, "sagaci<jus of his quarry from afar," eng^g'd in this traffic 
■with hundreds of boats, thousands of men and millions of capital. 

Green B;iy was his point of departure, as Mackinaw had been 
that of the French for many generations. But his employes 
pushed through the continent to the western ocean. Most of his 
fortune came from fur, and it would have been twice as large, but 
for the war of 1812. Bat even A-Jtor's fur agents of all classes 
were largely descendants of French voyageurs who had taken up 
their abode in the Northwest ages before. 

Falsehood and false fancies were also among the forces which 
first hurried the French far west. 

It is through no longing for alliterative initials that I add false 
fancies and fnlsehood as a fourth force to fun, faith and fur. At 
that ppriod all travelers, if not Munchausens themselves, believed 
Munchausen stories, and when people are willing to be deceived, 
they are deceived. Demand for lies never lacks supply. 

One Frenchman in Florida, when he saw a squaw so wrinkled 
that there was no room for one furrow more, believed the report 
that she had outlived five generations. Another, near Newfound- 
land, landed on an isle of demons not without wings, horns and 
tails. A third, when certain Canadian chiefs told him of a race 
who had but one leg and lived without food, took them to France 
for repeating their story to the king. These were sons of men 
who h id been ere iulous to Venetian merchants, who, selling spices 
for their weight in gold, advertised them as no product of the 
vulgar earth, but plucked from branches thrown down h'om the 
battlements of E ien by compassionate cherubim. The age of 
failh was not yet over. As recently as the last jear of the seven- 



41 



teenth century a company formed in France to work a mine of 
green earth reported to exist at the sources of the Mississippi, 
sent a party of thirty miners up that river. Their voyage up 
stream last d ten month?. 

Among the earliest volunteers from the retainers of Champlain 
to ascend the Ottawa with savages, who had descended from a 
country no white man had ever trod, was Vignan, in IGIO. On 
his return next season, he declared that he had pusln d on to a 
salt ?ea, seen the wreck of an English ship, and heird of Cathay 
and Zipango, — so China and Japan were then called — as not far 
away. 

The spark fell in gunpowder. Champlain heard not only what 
he wi.>^hed to believe, but what all men of his time an 1 a century 
after ht;ld for certain, that a short Northwest pa«s;ige to the East 
Indies existed, and would at once double the wealth of any nation 
which could appropriate it by right of discovery. His own fleet 
had been equipped in IdOS, not merely to colonize Acadia, but 
" to penetrate inland even to the Occidental sta and arrive some 
day at China." 

He believed that in 1609 a vessel, clearing from Acapulco, — a 
Mexican p Tt on the Pacific, lost its reckonmg in a storm, but 
after two months found i'self in Ireland, — and that the King of 
Spain had ordered the journal of the pilot to be burned so as to 
keep foreigners from knowing the course followed, but which 
was supp sed to be north of Cacada. The map of Vtrrazano, 
then still an authority, in addition to the Isthmus of Panama 
showed another no less narrow near the latitude of New York 
with the Pacific beyond it on the West. 

More than three score years afterward, La Salle sought that 
East Indian route by way of the Mississippi. Ilis estate just above 
Montreal was, and is still, cdled or nick-named, I/i Chine, that is 
China, because he started from there bound for the E:npire of 
Celestials. Years after he had stood at the mouth of the Missis- 
sippi, he spoke of that river as separated from the China sea only 
by the breadth of the province; of Culiacan, and was confident of 
meeiing not far fi'om the mouth of the Missouri, with rivers 
which flowed into the ocean he sought. 



42 



England shared in tlie delusion that the Pacific was near the 
Atlantic. Hence a barge was sent over to John Smith in Vir- 
ginia with orders to row it up the Potomac, carry it over the 
mountains, and launch it on some stream that flowed into the 
South sea, which was afterward made the western boundary of 
Connecticut 

The truth is that French and English alike had a short cut to 
China on the brain. No sooner then had Ghamplaia heard the 
story of Vignan than he hastened up the Ottawa with a crew of 
enthusiast?. Thirty five carrying-places and an infinity of hard- 
ships seemed nothing to him. When half way to Like Huron — 
at the Isle of AUumette, — he detected the imposition which Vig- 
nan had practiced upon him. Champlain was more magnanimous 
than certain p'o-pectors lately led into the Black Hills by a guide 
who promised them diggings that would yield thirty cents a pan, 
and finiHng him a liar straightway strung him up on the nearest 
tree. Champlain was more disappointed than the prospectors — 
yet he forgave the innpostor. 

The next year, 1615, taking a fresh start, he i-eached the head 
of the Ottawa, crossed to Lake Huron, — held councils with divers 
nations on that inland s^a, hearing of still other seas beyond — 
and saying to one and all: "Bring furs down to Quebec and 
show me the way to China." Plainly he thought one request as 
easy to grant as the other. 

The name of the first Wisconsin tribe with whijh the French 
became acquainted, and that before 1610, namely, Winnehagoes, 
was under^^tood by them to signify SaUwaler men, and western 
saltwater they associated only with the Pacific. Nicolet, the first 
white man on the Wisconsin (?), having voyaged down that river 
within some five and thirty leagues of the Mississipp', believed 
himself within three days march of the great sea of the west. 

The Indians were always notorious for repining whatever they 
perceived that whites desired to hear. They thus ho.ixed them 
all alike. Spaniards they tickled wiih stories of gold, New Eng- 
land Puiitans by legends concerning the Great Spiiit, and so they 
amused the Fiench, who came with a passion for China, with ac- 
counts of a Celestial empire. 



4S 



At that era various nations were rivals in searching for new 
routes to China, — the English through Hudson Bay, the Dutch 
north of Lap'and, and the French by way of the Great Lakes. 
They had all been denied access to the Eist Indies either by the 
Cape of Good Hope or of Horn, — which Spain and Portugal re- 
spectively blockaded, treating as privateers all who tried to pass. 
But their hopes were sanguine of finding another road thither, as 
the Italians when at the fall of Constantinople cut off from their 
medifeval thoroughfare eastward from the Levant, had set their 
faces westward and discovered America. The spirit of the age, 
" the grandeur of which," Froude pronounces " among the most 
sublime phenomena which the earth has witnessed," felt that only 
a corner of the veil had been lifted. All past findings just gave 
enough to wake the taste for more. 

Chaniplain was the more thoroughly persuaded that the Pacific 
was near Lake Huron because he had himself beheld Pacific 
surges at Panama, the longitude of which is not so far west as 
that lake by a dozen degrees. His sight strengthened his faith, 
which was never weak. Quartz pebbles picked up on the river 
bank at Q lebec he thought diamonds, and gave the rock above 
the name it bears to this day — Cape Diamond. 

On Joliei's return from d own the Mississippi, Frontenac's first 
feeling was regret that that river had not borne the explorer to 
the Pacific and to Jipan. His next emotion was hope that the 
Missouri — still anonymous, but called by Joliet a northwest 
branch entering the Mississippi in latitude 38 degrees — could be 
ascended to a lake with an outlet into the Vermilion Sea — his 
name for the Gulf of California. Seven years later, in 1680, 
Duluth, near the head waters of the Mississippi, heard of Henne- 
pin as a captive among the Sioux. He sought him out, procured 
his release and escorted him to Green Bay. But for this call to a 
mission of mercy, " my design was," says he, " to push on to the 
sea on the northwest, believed to be the Vermiliou Sea, from 
which a war party had come among the Sioux. Some of its salt 
they gave to three Frenchmen that I had sent out as a scout, and 
they brought it to me. According to their report it was no more 
than twenty days' march to a great lake the water of which was 



44 



not fit to drink, and which I had no doubt I could reach without 
difficulty." 

But all varieties of Frenchmen in America — the fur-hunter, 
the votary of fun and frolic and the apostle of faith — whatever 
their primary impulses, each man wa^ inspired to dive further 
into the west, by a lurking but fixed idea that he was himself the 
predestinated Columbus of the grand discovery — that portal 
through which men should bring the glory and honor of the 
nations to and from farthest India — that world's highway which 
lay hid from princes and plebeians till in the fullness of time 
California opened wide her Golden Gate on golden hinges turninsr. 

Only tho^e of us who rarneniber when California burst on the 
world like a sun-burst, or lightning shining from the west unto 
the east, as El Dorado no longer fabulous, can understand the 
fever and frenzy which burned in every man who set his foot 
toward the western unknown; his assurance that he was to be the 
revelator, not of an ignis fatuus or desert Nile fountain, but, of 
greater marvels than are dreamed of in all the Arab'an Nights — 
a fairyland where urchins play at cherry-pio with diamonds, 
where country wenches thread rubies instead of rowan berries for 
necklaces, where the pantiles are pure gold and the paving stones 
virgin silver. For such merchandise who, though n-) pilot., would 
not adventure to the farthest shore washed by the farthest sea? 

"The blood more ftirs to rouse a lion than to s'art a hare." 
Accordingly the illusions, that sheening far celestial seemed to be, 
of the China-seeker, the missionary and ihe funlover, yes, of the 
fur-dealer, roused them to efforts and crowned them with suc- 
cesses they could never have made had they seen things as ihey 
really were. 

Celestial visions flitting always a little ahead of western wan- 
derers were an analogue of Sydney Smith's pitent Tantalus. 
This was a bag of oats hung on the pole of his carriage. It 
rattled before the noses of his horses, but was about a foot beyond 
their reach. In both cases, also, the stimulating influence was 
very similar. 

Another French foundation was laid in the far west by politi- 
cal finesse and feudalism,. 



45 

The apostles of faith were also political intriguers. They 
knew that nothing but the supremacy of France could afford a 
basis for permanence in their missions. Accordingly, of them- 
selves they worked for French domination as for self-preservation, 
and they wtre often formally appointed ambassadors. 

Moreover, they sometimes established a sort of theocratic feu- 
dalism, or oriental patriarchate, in which they were themselves 
lords paramount. 

According to Parkman, "it behooved them to require obedi- 
ence from those whom they imagined God had confided to their 
guidance. Their consciences then acted in perfect accordance 
with the love of power innate in the human breast. 

"These allied forces mingle with a perplexing subtlety. Pride 
disgui-ed even from itself walks in the likeness of love and 
duty, and a thousand times on the pages of history we find hell 
beguiling the virtues of heaven to do its work. The instinct of 
domination is a weed that gro's's rank in the shadow of the 
temple." (Jesuits, p. 159.) 

Always and everywhere Jesuits have been charged with usurp- 
ing political sway. In 1667, the Canadian Intendant, Talon, ad- 
dressed a remonstrance to Colbert, the French premier, complain- 
ing that the Jesuits "grasped at temporalities, encroaching even 
on that police which concerned magistrates alone." This com- 
plaint related to intermeddlin:' on the St. Liwrence. But on the 
Upper Lakes and beyond them, there could not be too much 
Jesuit domination to please French statesmen. 

But another class of political agents were very early abroad in 
the west. Nicolet, whom I have mentioned as in Wisconsin in 
1634, and probably the first white man ever there, had been dis- 
patched to Green Bay as a peace maker between the tribes of that 
vicinity and the Hurons. 

Soon after the year 1650 the Iroquois had vanquished all the 
tribes east of Lake Michigan. They expelled them from their 
old homes, and drove most of them beyond that lake, some of 
them even beyond the Mississippi. In this flight theOttawas de- 
scending the Wisconsin, and pushing up the Mississippi some 
dozen leagues, entered the Little Iowa and sought an asylum on 



46 

its upper waters. For those tribes who lingered in Wisconsin 
there was no hope of fighting the Iroquois firearms without fire- 
arnas, and no hope of fire-arms except from the French. The 
governors of New France, to whom the Iroquois were sworn ene- 
mies, — at once saw the policy of lifting up these fugitives, unit- 
ing them in amity to each other, and to the tribes where they had 
fled for refuge, supplying them with kettles, tobacco, but above 
all with guns and powder, — in a word by every me ins stealing 
their hearts. For this end they disp itched into Wi-onsin and 
further a sp3ciei of envoys of whi;h Nicolas Perrot was a good 
representative. 

This Indian commissioner had been prepare 1 for his functions 
by much western experience. lie was first in Jesuit employ as a 
lay-brother, and then becxme an adventurer in quest of fin and 
fur where no white man's foot had trod. No doubt he was in 
make half Indian, and when present at a war dano would lead 
it, like Frontena3 at thrje score and ten, wh)op'ng like the rest, 
or rather outwhooping them all. The Indians nimed him " Pop- 
corn," perhips because when heated he seemed to them to grow 
ten times bigger, like the dwarf who declared that though his 
avoirdupo s in the scile was ordinarily only one hundred and 
twenty pounds, whehevi r he got mad he wrighed a ton. 

His o(ricial career in Wisconsin began at latest in 1665. After 
making friendship with the Pottawatomies at Green Bay, he 
pushed up Fox River and into a lake of which it is an outlet. 
There he held a council with the Oatagamies, After this fashion 
he went on for five years, — at home with tribe after tribe — at 
home in th3 customs and diale3ts of all the enormous ang'e be- 
tween the upper Mississippi and the upper lakes. He brought 
many nations into a confederation with each other and against the 
Iroquois. H s farne, like Solomon's, brought visitors into Green 
Bay from the uttermost parts of the earth, — some who sooke of 
trading with Mexican Spaniards and others who de-cribed white 
men fir north in a hoase which walked on the water — meaning 
the English- on Hudson bay. (2 178 La Potherie.) How he was 
borne aloft on a buffalo robe, reverenced for fashioning iron as 
squaws did dough in a kneading trough, and feared as holding in 
his hands thunder and lightning, we have ?ecD heady. 



47 

In 1671 he was interpreter for a dozen nations whose delegates 
largely through his persuasions then gathered at Mackinaw and 
acknowledged the sovereignly of Fraic?. Ili-i influence over 
them was seen in 16S1, and again three years after, when, as I 
have before stated, he induced five hundred warriors from Wis- 
consin, and iK3ar it, to paddie their canoes many a hundred miles 
in order as allie-i of the French to fisjht agiins', the Ifoquois. 
Aocor']ing to Indian ideas his greatest exploit was delivering 
from torture find death a captive whom the savages had resolved 
to burn. No common miracle was it to make Indians forego the 
ecstasy of beholding and gloating on an enemy in agony. The 
French then aimed to make the we<?tern chiefs do homage to their 
king as a suzerain, ami fight shou'der to shoulder in hi^ battles. 

But many adventurers from France also sought to become 
themselves a sort of feudal barons. -To this end they secured 
patents of nobility wiih land-grants, termed seigniories. Some of 
these bordered on the S^ Lawrence and LakeChamplain. But these 
eastern estates ]u?t gave enough to wake the taste for more. At 
the outlet of Lake Ontario La Salle possessed a domain stretch- 
ing five leagues along the shore, besides others almost boundless 
on Lake Michigan, and whatever in other unknown regions he 
could conquer. As Ci)l. Colt invented a patent revolver, so La 
Salle expected to hold as a patent-right; the realm he had re- 
vealed. He was sanguine that his principality would be more at- 
tractive to immigrants than Canada. It was prairie which needed 
no clearing, — it was m^ra fertile, of milder climite and more 
varied proiiuct-, manv of them — as salt, grapes and hemp — lin 
known in Canada. Not a few similar land-claims ba^ed on gov- 
ernmental grants were set up by French occupants when the 
United States assumed jurisdiction over Wisconsin. The Norman 
race which centuries before had feudalized all Europe, now meant 
to master the Mississippi Valley. French wanderers were not 
unfrequently elected chiefs of tribes. Perrot was so honored 
among nine different nations. French officers al.-o came with a 
retinue of their own countrymen, whom they ruled by martial 
law, being sometimes judge, jury and executioners all at once. 
This one-man power, where no law was known but his will, was 



48 

the secret of many a success. It inspired a salutary fear where 
the common law of England and even the civil law of continental 
Europe wouM only have provoked contempt. 

At Frontenac La Salle wrought wonders. The n itives were 
compliant to his will like clay in the hands of a potter. At his 
bidding they seitled near his fort, cleared land, tilled it, worked 
on the fortifications and on houses, sent their children to school. 
According to Parknian, "seignior by royal grant of waterfront 
for five leagues, — feudal lord of the forests around, — commander 
of a garrison raised and paid by himself,— founder of the mis- 
sion, — patron of the church, — he reigned the autocrat of his 
lonely empire." Nor was he altogether destitute of feudal trap- 
pings, — for, according to his chuplain, Hennepin, on state occa- 
sions he wore a scarlet mantle laced with gold. 

On the Illinois river his sucr-ess was still more marvelous. The 
colony he there extemporized was reckoned in 16S4 to contain 
4,000 Indian warriors or 'iOOOO souls, like the peasantry of the 
raiddle-ages, clustered around his rock fi)rt, "Starved Kock," 
perched high as an eagle's nest. The region around be bad be- 
gun to parcel out among his f )llowers. 

Fee'ing equal to the grandest enterprises, he had longed for 
liberty to beard the Spaniard in Northern Mexico. Having been 
granted that liberty, had he not been betrayed on his way back 
to the Mississippi, he would have made S'arved Rock the strat- 
egic base of active operations against Mexicans. All the region 
between that p ist, styled St. L mis, and the South Se^, was sub- 
jected to him by his French coinmission. 

Judging by such an experiment, and before the failures in this 
direction which followed bard after, it was not unreasonable to 
hope for founding feudal baronies far west' with French retainers 
as henchmen of each dignitary, and a crowd of aboriginal vassals 
beneath all the whites; but supporting all by fur and farming in 
lime of peace, and not less by filling the ranks in time of war. 
There still exists an early map of New France with a fort in 
every seigniory. 

Enterprising Erenchmen, who aspired to the independence of a 
media3val nobleman, must needs go west in order -to find what 



49 

thej sought. No populous native tribes still survived east of 
Lake Huron. The French were hemmed in by the English and 
Iroquois on the south, while short days and long winters repelled 
them from the north. On the other hand, everything allured 
them westward — natural highways, mild climate, fertile soil, 
prairies that needed no clearing, buffaloes fancied ready to yield 
wool and draw the plow, friendly Indians, and — more than all — 
elbow room, safe from Canadian dictators. The founders of Mon- 
treal had been brow-beaten in Quebec. The vice-governor at 
Montreal was not very subordinate to the royal functionary at 
Quebec, but more so than the officials upon Ontario and further 
were to his own jurisdiction. They were their own masters. 

In addition to this, French intrigues in the far we5t were multi- 
plied and intensified by pecuniary interest. Nothing but politi- 
cal supremacy in that distant realm could assure prosperity in that 
fur-trade where lay their sole hope of money-making. 

As soon as they had secured sway in any tribe they first said, 
"Bring all your fur to our factors!" This point gained, their 
second demand was, " Make your neighbors do likewise, peace- 
ably if you can, but forcibly if you must." Thus it came to pass 
that many a brave was butchered to procure beaver for French 
whose policy was that of ^Esop's monkey : 

" That cunning old pug everybody remembers, 
Who, when he saw chestnuts a roasting in embers, 
To spare his own bacon, took pussy's two foots, 
And out of the ashes he hustled his nuts." 

Considerations such as these show how powerfully the finesse 
of political schemers and the ambitions of feudalism roused the 
French to penetrate into the utmost corner of the west. 

The English also, as adventurers, traders, or both, tried to push 
into the farthest western wilds. But the French outstripped them, 
arrested their factors and explorers and treated them as outlaws. 
The motto of the French was : 

" It shall go hard, 

But we will delve one yard below their mineg 

And blow them at the moon." 
4b 



50 



The French foundations in the Northwest proved failures. 
When French officers gazed at the charge of the six hundred at 
Balaklava, they cried out: "This is admirable, but it is not 
war," So French foundations in the Northwest were wonderful 
beyond all wonder, but they did not constitute a state, one whole 
body fitly framed together, which vital in every part cannot but 
by annihilating, die. 

The first foundation was Fun. Fun taken in homeopathic 
doses is good, butit is by no means substantial food for a lifetime 
much less for a nation's life. At all events it either finds or makes 
frivolous those to whom it is all inall, — labor and not merely lux- 
ury, — business as well as lecreation. If all the year were playing 
holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work. Savage life, how- 
ever fascinating at a distance as to the novelist Cooper, or the sen- 
timentalist Rousseau, loses romance when viewed close at hand 
as by Paikman domiciliated among Dakotahs — indeed by the 
sober second thought of any one capable of appreciating civiliza- 
tion and aspiring to progress. 

The result was that French fun-lovers, either like Nicolet re- 
turned from their sportive sallies to dwell among thtir own peo- 
ple as well as educative and elevating institutions, or on the other 
hand, they sunk to the low level of the aborigines around them, 
perhaps degraded them still lower by the vices of civilization. 
The backwoods maxim proved true; that it is the hardest 
thing in the world to make a white man out of an Indian, while 
it is very easy to make an Indian out of a white man. 

The apostles of faith also failed in the far west. Their want of 
success was due in part to the extermination by war and plague 
of tribes among whom they ministered, in part to inability to re- 
claim other tribes from nomadic habits, and in part to the nature 
of their teachings. Their exhibition of Christianity was rather 
spectacular than intellectual, more emotional than practical. 
Among their maxims I find these: " li is God's will that who- 
ever is born a subjVct should not reason but obey." " Teaching 
girls to read is robbing them of time." They taught singing but 
not reading. No newspaper appeared in New France till after 
the British conquest. At an Indian college which had flourished 



51 



for a generation Frontenac, relates that no student could speak 
French. In sp te of all pains pupils proved Calibans on whom 
nurture would never stick. Of one that was taken to France at 
a tender age, baptized, and learned French well, I read that when 
brought back to Canada as an interpreter, he became as rude a 
barbari in as any one and held fast, his barbarism to the end. 

If the Jesuits had had free course on our Upper Likes, the result 
would have been nations submissive but not self-suflQcing, peace- 
able but unable to defend themselves — having the personnel of 
men but the puerility of children. They had an ordinance to 
hasten the jV/^s/ca^ weaning of Indian children — but their 
mental weaning they would never permit, 

Fiontenac's report to the home government was : " The Jesuits 
will not civilize the Indians because they wish to keep them in 
perpetual wardship. Their missions are hence mockeries." They 
censured La Salle because at his fort he had some fifty Indian 
children taught to read and write. 

Compared with the sturdy Puritan, the self-reliant Yankee, the 
products of Jesuit training would seem those legendary monkeys 
who were intended to be men, but whose creation being begun on 
Siturday afternoon, was interrupted by the coming on of the Sab- 
bath, so that they were sent into this breathing world scarce half 
made up. Their development remains arrested still. Well is it 
said : " A man to be a man must feel that he holds his fate in his 
own hands." 

However Jesuits might have succeeded, in blowing up a bub- 
ble, bright and polished as glass and iridescent with rainbow hues, 
it must have burst at the first rude shock from without, as did the 
insubstantial pigeant which they conjured up in Paraguay. 

A heretic would say that their system had not truth enough in 
it to make a lasting He. Hence it was, " The perfume and sup- 
pliance of a minute." 

The far-trader rejoiced in a longer success than either the votary 
of fun or the apostle of faith. But Iris occupation too was gone 
at length. Far-bearing animals vanished even sooner than the 
forests that. sheltered them. 

Fish began to be taken in Canadian waters before the first furs 



52 



were trapped on Canadian shores. The fish continue now as mul- 
titudinous as ever, while the fur is no more found. Five and a 
half millions have we recently paid for the right to fish in Cana- 
dian waters. 

Crops springing out of the bosom of the earth are exhaustless 
like a living spring. Beasts wandering over its surface, or living 
in its dens, pass away, like desert streams in summer, and what 
is worse, are never renewed as those streams are. 

Beaver Dam as the name of a city in Wisconsin may always 
endure, but the cunning handiwork of the beaver, chief favorite 
among fur-bearers, is to day scarcely discoverable in all the 
State. The beaver's gone beyond redemption, gone with a gallop- 
ing consumption. Not all the quacks with all their gumption, will 
ever mend him. 

The chief Yankee staple was fish ; that of the French was fur. 
The contrast between the races was palpable. Accordingly the 
natives named the Yankees Kinshon, which signifies "lash," and 
the French Onontio, that i?, "Big Mountain." The latter name 
may have been suggested by Gallic pomposity. But after labors 
manifold the mountain brought forth a mouse, and the fish 
swallowed him. 

The victims lured on by falsehood or false fancies in pursuit of 
a short cut to the farthest East, were no less heart breakingly dis- 
appointed than the men of fun, fur and faith. 

Their chase in the West of an ever-fleeing East, reminds me of 
De Soto chasing the phantom of a rejuvenating fountain. Both 
long roved in a fool's paradise, but at length wasted sinewy vigor, 
like thirst-parched pilgrims, running after the mirage when the 
sultry mist frowns o'er the desert with a show of waters mocking 
men's distress. 

But after all both achieved great discoveries, like alchemists, 
not of what they sought, but of whatever was to be found. De 
Soto discovered the lower Mississippi, and French visionaries the 
upper, its head- waters, the Yellow Stone and the Rocky Moun- 
tain backbone of the continent. They were the first who ever 
burst into our inmost shrines. 

But their aims were low. At its best their ideal was not to 



53 

found nations circled bj all that exalts and embellishes civilized 
life. It was merely to discover a thoroughfare to the Pacific and 
the Indies ready made to their hands. This ideal was never 
realized, and under the old regime of the French it never could be. 

To make such a pathway, or rather more than rojal highway 
was a beau ideal reserved for the Anglo-Saxon of our times, and 
his ideal was straightway actualized, — the firstlings of his heart 
became the firstlings of his hand. Some of us cannot worship 
the heroes of our trans-continental roads. Even we, however, 
■must admit that but for their iron will we should even now re- 
joice in no iron ways. 

Indians and French — path-finders like Fremont — were a 
vapor that appeared for a little time — at most an Indian summer. 

Yankees brushing them away, working mines of lead and lum- 
ber, and then extracting agricultural wealth yet more perennial 
and wide-spread, have buih on firmer foundations, and are efSo- 
rescing in a higher style of culture throughout all departments of 
life. 

The French who occupied the Northwest either as missionaries 
among Indians, and those bound by vow to celibacy, or who 
adopted Indian ways of life, naturally proved a rjce no less 
•ephemeral than the natives themselves. They vanished all the 
sooner because they entered that region in small numbers. Indeed 
French immigrants were nowhere numerous in America. 

But had one single feature of French policy been different, the 
change in American history would have been great beyond cal- 
culation. Huguenots, the only class of Frenchmen ready to leave 
France^ were not permitted to enter New France. Had they been 
welcome there, legions of them would have penetrated its wilds 
as far as any fanatical Jesuit or jolly rover. They would have 
outnumbered the English American?, being driven abroad by 
worse persecutions at home. They would have furnished mate- 
rial for such agricultural and manufacturing centers on the Upper 
Lakes as Lx Salle vainly strove to found in Illinois. 

In the next place, most of those French refugees who enriched 
Switzerland, Holland, Germany, England, and divers British col- 
onies, especially those on the Atlantic coast, with new arts or old 



54 



ones plied with new skill, would have betaken themselves to 
Canada. There no strange language nor strange institutions re- 
pelled them. They never williogly expatriated themselves, and in 
New France they would have seemed still at home. It has not 
been enough noticed that New France was at first founded by 
French Protestants, and that the early 'adventurers thither were of 
the same faith, as well as that outfitters being Calvinists would 
not admit Jesuits into their ships. Next, the two religions for a 
time there held divided empire. When a pries't and a minister 
there died on the same day, they were laid in the same grave. 
"Let us see," it was said, " whether they who have always lived 
at war will now lie ia peace." The first petition of Jesuits that 
" reformed religionists," so-called, should be forbidden to inhabit 
Canada dates from 1621. Eejected at that time by the French 
king it was granted six years afterwards. 

Had such been the French foundations in our Northwest, they 
might still have stood strong there. The Canadians, while scarcely 
a tithe of the English, held their own for a century. What if 
they had surpassed them 'in numbers, as much as they did in 
unity, military spirit, and friendship for the aborigines? 

In all likelihood France and England would today hold di- 
vided empire throughout the territory embraced by the United 
States. The settler.-^, — each race afraid of the other, — would 
both have clung to their mother countries, and sought protection 
Tinder their wingt^. During the Napoleonic wars, instead of being 
developed by the carryiog-trade of Earop?, — by a market there 
for all our products, and by dedication to the arts of peace, we 
colonists should have been all the while belligerents, — and that 
between two fires, pierced by invasions from the west, while our 
coast was ravaged and our ports bombarded. 

Not a few in this audience are of Huguenot descent. Their 
ancestors in all colonial wars must have fought against those 
British provinces for which in fact they fought. 

Even if the colonies, — English and French,— had one or both 
of them become independent, each race would have forcced the 
other to maintain a standing army of European proportions, to 
build a Chinese wall, or line of forts — "the labor of an age in 



65 

piled stones," — from the Upper Lakes to the Gulf. Border col- 
lisions would daily occur. Wars must have been frequent and 
chronic. 

Again, had the French centuries ago burst into the Northwest 
by thousands instead of b}'^ scores, they would have planted their 
mediaeval institutions too deeply to be rooted out. Lords of broad 
domains would have monopolized the land. Under them would 
have been vassals uneducated save to drudgery or death dealing, 
not one in a thousand of them rising above the low level of that 
inglorious throng in which they were born. The Texan question 
of a witness, " Do you write your name like a monk, or make 
your mark like a gentleman?'' would have been common all the 
way from the tropic to the pole. 

The masses would have remained clannish retainers of heredi- 
tary chiefs. Each seigniory would have been a section cut out 
of France with all the pre-revolutionary enormities carried over 
ocean and continent like the angel-borne holy house of Loretto, 
and set down in the Mississippi Valley with all its imperfections 
on its head. 

Even that earthquake revolution which toppled to the earth 
the feudal fabrics of France, would not have extended into the 
heart of this continent. It was, in fact, powerless even on the 
lower St. Lawrence, so far as not reinforced by British thunder. 

On the whole, had Huguenots been tolerated from the first in 
New France, a million of them would have migrated there, and 
its population would have been no less numerous or puissant than 
that of British America. All the European colonies in America 
would probably still be subject to their parent states. 

At all events they would have so balanced each other, and 
their mutual relations would have been so antagonistic, that the 
rise, progress and world-wide influence of those institutions and 
that form of society which are distinctively American, would 
have been impossible. America would have been Europeanized. 
There is no room in the universe for both Christ and Belial. So 
there was no room in these United States for both freedom and 
feudalism. 

Well then may we thank God for the intolerance of Louis 



56 

XIY, or rather for the passing-pleasing tongue of Madam Mainte- 
non, which kept that Grand Monarque her unconscious servitor. 
Though he meant not so, neither did her heart think so, their pol- 
icy was suicidal. They were pioneers clearing the ground for the 
undisturbed establishment and expansion of a system — political, 
religious, educational, social, — which was ordained by GoJ, and 
utilized by man, for revolutionizing not only America, but France 
and Europe. May that system of ours pervade the world, endure 
forever, and prove a survival of the fittest ! 

In our northwest French and Indians have stamped their 
names forever on many natural -features, — lakes, rivers, moun- 
tains, and on hamlets which have, or will, beoome cities. But, 
while names are French and Indian, — as Chicago and St. Louis, — ■ 
all else, — all distinguishing characteristics bespeak the Anglo- 
Saxons. They came out from Great Britain in order to build on 
a broader basis a Britain yet greater, continental and cosmopoli- 
tan, gathering together in one those whom Babel scattered abroad. 
Hence it has come to pass, that in the world's wide mouth, we to- 
day are called, not New French, nor yet New English, nor by the 
name of any Europeans whatever, but Americans^ now and for- 
ever Americans. That cognomen is already all our own, and this 
fact I hail as an omen that the continent also in all its length as 
well as breadth will be ours ere long ; 

"The unity and married calm of states." 



H 107 89 Hi 




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